Don't Leave Me Hanging On the Telephone: A Rant about DSL

My DSL line and I have developed a very dysfunctional relationship. A few weeks ago, I procrastinated on taking care of some business and ended up with a disconnected phone line. For some strange reason too complicated to explain, this caused my DSL line (provided to me by DSL Extreme, a company totally unrelated to my telephone company) to have to be "disconnected and reconnected" and would apparently take 7-10 business days. That was three weeks ago.

I spoke with DSL Extreme Customer Disservice over the weekend* and was told that I was disqualified from receiving service. "But but but," I cry, "I ALREADY had service."

"Too bad," they said. "You are now too far away from thesomethingoranother to get service."

"Did thesomethingoranother move?"

"No, the rules changed."

Okay so let's review, I live in one of the largest, most modern cities in the world. I have already had DSL service at my current address for 6 months but suddenly it is not available and my only option is dial-up which I never have been able to make work.

Customer Disservice lady (who was actually nice in contrast to the folks I dealt with later in the saga) agreed to try to "override" the disqualification but could not attempt to do so until Monday when the phone company opened. Splendid!

Tuesday I call DSL Extreme to follow up. This time I am not quite as lucky. I speak with a horrible woman named Christine who, after a long explanation of what I need, still does not get it. Instead she tells me that I can no longer receive service at my current address so I have two options - I can pay the $250 early termination fee and terminate my contract or I can pay $81 to "buy my contract out" and they will "cancel" the contract and "waive" the early termination fee.

You might note my excessive use of quotation marks here. That is because I find it hard to understand how my contract is being cancelled if I will still have to fulfill my obligations under the contract while DSL Extreme no longer is willing or able to provide me with the service for which I contracted. Moreover, buying my contract out puts me in worse position than if I simply kept paying each month because I would have to come up with the money up front.

I explained to Christine that *I* was not terminating the contract but instead DSL Extreme was terminating the contract and therefore I should not be paying any type of fee whatsoever nor buying out a contract. She simply wasn't hearing it. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

After Christine condescendingly told me to "have a nice day", I was sent to Vanessa who, unbelievably, was even ruder and less helpful than Christine. She acts as if the buy out my contract option is a big favor she is doing for me and maintains that I am at fault for the whole thing because I did not fulfill my obligation to maintain a working phone line at all times. Apparently this gives DSL Extreme the right to rip people off for $250 according to Vanessa's interpretation of the contract. At this point I am starting to get ticked. I ask to speak with Vanessa's manager and she . . . HANGS UP ON ME. Nice.

Okay, here is the happy ending. I dashed off an irate email to the General Manager of the company. I think I might have thrown around some of that fancy lawyer talk (have I mentioned I am a lawyer on this blog yet?) There were suggestions of violations of unfair business practice laws. Terms such as "unfair adhesion contract" and "consumer unfriendly" were bandied about. I have to say that although I am proud of what I do for a living, I rarely if ever play the lawyer card. In fact, mostly I downplay my occupation so I don't get stuck hearing about someone's Child Support issues in Texas or whatever. Here, however it seemed to work.

I got two voice mail messages from DSL Extreme today. First one told me that the "override" went through and I would be back on-line as of February 5. The second one profusely apologized for the ill treatment I received and promised to waive any fees I paid for the time that my service was down. Sometimes, it pays to be a squeaky wheel. With a JD.

*For the sake of brevity, I will spare you the excruciating details of how many calls I had to make, how many minutes I had to wait on hold per call and how many times I was redirected to call a different number. Suffice to say that by the time I finally spoke to a live person who had a clue, I was speaking through clenched teeth. I should also note that the primary reason I choose DSL Extreme to service my broadband needs was because they are a local SFV company and I thought perhaps their technical support was less likely to be outsourced to a country where people speak very good English with very thick accents.