I've used numerous long distance companies over the years and finally settled on Sprint for local residential service and AT&T for long distance. I also have had a Sprint PCS cell phone for 3 years and have experienced great customer service. Lately I wanted to purchase a pay as you go cell phone for my daughter and did not want her to use my minutes on my plan. I researched all of the ones available in my area and settled on Cingular's KIC. boy was that a mistake. She has had the phone and service for 2 weeks and already we have tried over 20 times to reach customer service to no avail for various reasons. I finally stood in line for one hour and 20 minutes to talk to a Cingular customer representative in the local service center only to be told that I should call the 1-800 customer service number for all issues. I should have known when I purchased my Sprint Cell phone and coverage on the web, manage it on the web, and receive great customer service that when it took me 2 hours to purchase my daughter's cell phone in person from cingular it was a bad omen...

>>I am sure there are thousands of just causes for concern of jobs in the United States. I heard this on television last night.
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>>http://www.cwa-union.org/fairnessatverizon/Pledge/index.asp?
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>Accidentally, when I moved here two months ago, I had no choice but to take Verizon for local and broadband. The experience is worse than awful. Not the service itself - phone works, DSL speed is fine - but with their online services and all the situations when I had to talk with them.
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>First, the service number they give for Virginia (yes, one for all Virginia - it's in Richmond) is easy to dial, and after you go through a bunch of menu options, it either hangs up, or leaves you waiting indefinitely. On other numbers they have they usually pass you to the next - next - next 'associate' (is 'worker' politically incorrect?). You then explain what you want for the nth time and get patched back to this Richmond number. Sounds like old Basic code: "10 GOTO 10". Sometimes you get where you should go, but that's not easy.
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>How I got the phone line? I ordered it through their web site. Except that it got nowhere. They had my data alright, and the confirmation number I got served only to save me from spelling my name another ten times - the online order created no workorder, still had to do it on the phone, which took two hours. Then they wanted two picture documents from me - no fingerprints nor DNA samples so far - which I faxed, and then waited four hours they required for "processing" of these documents. Four hours later I was on the phone with someone again, and she asked whether I had faxed those and when. So much for processing - she found them while she spoke with me, and said they were OK. This took only half an hour on the phone. My phone line came up within an hour - except that my phone number was not what they gave me online, and nobody told me which number I got. Found it out later when someone read my caller ID and told me.
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>DSL was a special case - there was no way to order it together with the phone line - you have to have a live line first. This took about two weeks and four hours on the phone.
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>When the first bill arrived I discovered that the "comprehensive package" which includes regional calling and a few free services was not a "comprehensive package", but rather an optional package charged on top of the base package. Analyzing its content I concluded that I am not using any of these optional things, and wanted to cancel. Online - no way, there's only and "add Verizon Freedom" option button (should be a checkbox, but we're not discussing GUI here), while for everything else there's "add or change". Of course, the pages are written in a way that there's no possibility to choose nothing - that doesn't pass validation.
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>So I tried calling them, got nowhere. I emailed them, and got this:
>

Thank you for your recent email. We appreciate your inquiry and understand
>your concerns. Your email has reached the Verizon Online Internet Services billing
>department. Your local Verizon Phone Office can provide the information that you
>require. In order to assist you, we request that you please contact your Residential
>Phone Billing office. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion and look forward
>to helping resolve your issue.
>
>Should you have any additional questions regarding your Verizon Online service, please
>do not hesitate to contact us. We appreciate your business and value you as a customer.
>Thank you for choosing Verizon Online as your Internet Service Provider.

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>...except there's no address, no local phone numbers - nothing. Where the hell is my local phone office? There's Verizon Wireless, but I visited them once and they denied any connection with land lines and broadband. They didn't even know whether those had an office around here.
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>I never expected I'd say "Sprint, come back, everything's forgiven", but I did, several times.