The Walkin' Verizon Fios $300 Amazon Card Blues

[mimi85]

Hi all, I just needed somewhere to vent! This certainly isn't important in the whole scheme of things by far, just an assault on my sanity.

We signed up for the Verizon Fios bundle and part of the "deal" was either an Amazon $300 gift card or a $300 Visa card.

Since I seem to spend far too much dinero on Amazon anyway, I decided on that. My husband, being the OCD neat freak that he is, shredded the Visa card.

I have spent literally over 7 hours in total trying to activate the card. Seriously, I am not exaggerating. Like 3 hours+ yesterday and 4+ hours today. I've talked to so many idiotic people and have been shuffled around with so many different phone numbers, so many different answers and just generally clueless people. The last call ended up with some supervisor at Verizon who said he was going to escalate the case (to Jeff Bezos?) and since he had a couple of days off, he would call me Tuesday morning. Actually, the people themselves were nice and did try to help, but had no idea what to do.

The picture on Fios is definitely better than cable, we'd been thinking about switching from cable for ages (we both used to work for cable in the early days when it wasn't such a corporate monstrosity). Since Time Warner was on my shit list anyway, the $300 gave us the extra push we needed. I even told Verizon why not just credit my account the $300, letting me somehow hang on to whatever sanity I had left. But nooooooo! That one didn't fly - it would've been too damn easy.

I quit drinking eons ago (lousy drinker) but this was the closest I'd come to wanting a tall frosty cold one. I was a marketing manager when I worked for the dark side, so I know how these promos can backfire. This one backfired so badly I can still smell the smoke.

Thanks for letting me rant, you may see me on Judge Judy one of these days. Hope you all are having a better weekend than I am.

[catchnrelease]

1. Wow, sorry to hear that

It does make your head want to explode.

We switched to the Fios thing probably a year and a half ago and we opted for the Visa gift card bonus. We had to wait for some period of time before we could use it, I can't recall how long, maybe one full payment cycle or some thing like that. I was sure it would be a trick and somehow it would not work. But when the time came I did use it and it worked as a normal gift card. I think at that time it was supposed to be for $300 but for some reason when it came it was for $400, and that's what was on the card. So for all my skepticism, I can't complain about that part of it. I do remember that when the first bill came it was way bigger than I expected due to there being a month and a half worth of billing or something along those lines. I really went over the bill to be sure we weren't getting ripped off in some way, and to be honest I can't say if we did or not. How sad that it has to be so complicated.

We are thinking about going with a different cell phone provider and I dread what a hassle it will be to remove that service from the bundle. I know that the Verizon people will try everything to prevent us from dropping the cell service and make it more difficult that it needs to be.

I hope you can get it straightened out without a lot more stress!