So today I decided to try to catch-up on some lingering issues with people who I pay money to. The two I targeted today was an odd phone message from a company claiming to be connected to Boston Sports Clubs and Verizon. To boot I also had to reschedule a delivery of my elliptical runner. Many of these actions were done while showing Madeline internet programs adding to the challenge of resolving them.

The Verizon story begins with the fact that I now have FiOS but I do not have any bills for FiOS. Since ‘tis the season to pay bills I decided to investigate. I chatted with a helpful online clerk who informed me that I was chatting with Verizon the phone company and not the Verizon the internet provider and that she understood my problem. Apparently online accounts for Verizon are now so high tech that they don’t bill you via the standard mail system but instead using a secret Verizon account that is ultrasecure. In order to determine what you owe for Verizon online you need to have the email address and password. The email address is “something”@verizon.com”. So I tried about a hundred variations of email addresses in the online form to login to my account and failed while listening to them put me on hold for half an hour. When I finally got through to the person on the phone after successfully answering the questions that a computer tried to ask me like what zip code I was in it then cut me off and hung up on me. So I needed to try again in the later afternoon.

Meanwhile in the morning I called a number that had been forwarded to me from my dad. An organization had been calling my parents house leaving gruff messages about my owing money. When he finally asked about why the organization told him that I owed Boston Sports Clubs $132.00. So I called the number and a woman answered the phone. She responded to the item number and told me that I owed money but seemed to have a great deal of difficulty understanding the basics of what I told her as I walked through my credit card information. Then after I gave her the credit card information she started asking a series of personal questions that had nothing to do with my relationship to her or Boston Sports Clubs including “Are you married?” and “How long have you lived in your current residence?” I refused to answer either of these questions and after the call figured that I probably didn’t want these creepy people to have my credit card information.

I decided to call the Boston Sports Clubs people to verify that they may have sent my information to this creepy collection agency over whatever charge they had. I did successfully cancel my account with BSC a few months ago and could understand how they might need money from me but I’m not sure they are buying themselves anything by taking me to a collection agency instead of sending me a letter or calling the phone number they had on file for my account which is my cell phone and hasn’t changed in 8 years. How the collection agency found my parents is a mystery. So upon calling BSC I talked to Dominick who found that I did have a record in their computers but could not answer my question about whether BSC had decided to sick the collection agency upon me. He needed a manager to do this and there are no managers at BSC or anyone capable of looking up what happened to a delinquent account on the day after Christmas.

Luckily Sarah recently lost her credit card and needed a new one. So on my long list of to dos was to order her a new credit card to replace hers. But the Citi people let me know that the best way to do this was to order two replacement cards with new numbers to replace the old numbers. So I did this and felt better about the potential for the collection or whatever they were folks to commit identity theft on me.

Then in the afternoon as I was at the Decordova museum I received a call from the collections agency asking me what was wrong with the credit card I had given them. I told them that I had cancelled it and was waiting to verify whether I should pay them or not with the folks who had sent me to them. The woman then forwarded me to a manager who acted like the typical angry collections agency person talking to a deadbeat trying to weasel their way out of a debt. She let me know that I needed to pay them either via a credit card or via western union money order by the end of the day OR they would make a note in the file to continuously pursue me, notify their client that I was not willing to pay, and potentially cause damage to my credit score. After a long conversation with her explaining that I was happy to pay any debt that I had but that I wanted to confirm with her client that I actually owed money we parted ways on a rather unpleasant note.

So when I got home I was ready to listen to another 30 or forty minutes of musak on the Verizon line. This time I had dug up the official documentation that they had sent me with the installation of the modem that included the phone number to call for help. I again went through the complex menus to finally get put into a nice queue where a person answered after fifteen minutes. The person was surprised that I was calling Verizon about service not relating to a Verizon phone number but then did understand that my problem was that I didn’t have a bill from them for my FiOS or any way to know how to pay them if I did know the amount since I didn’t have an account. The crux f the problem was that I somehow don’t have the “name”@verizon.net email address and password that they use to produce bills. So she nicely let me know that a technician can solve these sorts of problems by resetting the verizon.net email address on the account. All that was left to happen was for her to connect to one of these technicians and then they would change the username and password. I would then get that information and could then login to this account to retrieve my bill so that I could pay it.

So during the extra 15 minutes I was put on hold waiting for the technician to come onto the line I began writing this little blog entry about my experiences today. As you may be able to tell by now I have had a lot of time on my hands to write during the musak experience from Verizon.

Since that issue is not yet resolved to date I can now mention the matter of the delivery of my elliptical runner. I ordered it from Gym Source a couple weeks ago and they scheduled a delivery for last Friday. This was fine since the Friday before Christmas break is a pretty slow day in general. I was home from 2:30 PM on as they requested. Sure enough at 5:30 I received a call from someone outside who was the driver of a truck who had effectively wedged his truck between the small lane on my side street and the more major road of Glenn Avenue. The truck was a rear wheel drive truck with the rear wheels spinning on Leeson lane and the front cab sticking into the snow bank across the street from it. So the driver and his other guy asked for help getting the truck unstuck so that they could get on with their delivery and their day.

Now it isn’t like it hasn’t been snowing the past few weeks so I understand how a truck might get stuck. In truth the problem with the ice on Leeson lane is probably the City of Newton’s fault. They plowed the lane during the first snow storm of the year but for snow storm number two and number three they didn’t do anything. So the lane itself has become a big stream of ice. On my side I did happen to have a bag of quick melt that I happened to have purchased a few days before. I had learned after the first storm that I could go through massive amounts of quick melt trying to clear the ice. My father had offered me a 50 gallon drum of the stuff so that Sarah wouldn’t slip in our sloped driveway while 9 months pregnant. I worked but had run out before the second storm started. For the second storm I had been clever enough to go out to National Lumber in Natick to purchase a heavy metal shovel and an ice chopper. Afterwards I had slipped over to the Gym Source store to purchase the elliptical runner since I was wasting the day anyways planning for a snow storm. At the time I still had some ice melt and the crappy shovel that I had bought at Building 19 thinking I was clever about 3 months earlier. I had no idea what I was in for.

So I had a shovel and ice chopper to fight the build-up but it was not enough to clear Leeson Lane due to the lack of plowing by the City. But I did find those two 50 pound bags of quick melt on the Wednesday morning at a local hardware store. They were about 25 bucks each which astounded me. When the third storm hit on Thursday night Joe A was coming over for dinner and I was getting overwhelmed by all the snow continuously falling. So my dad mentioned that he had a solution – to purchase a snow blower at Home Depot for me. So a few minutes after Joe and his wife Sarah arrived at my house my dad also arrived with a snow blower to clear the snow. I happily tested it out quickly before we ate a random dinner selected from Bills Pizzeria and then cleared things more afterwards.

The basin in the sump pump in the basement was starting to get very full during this storm but that’s a whole other story. So anyways when the truck was wedged between the streets it was snowing a bit and I offered one of the two 50 pound bags of quick melt to them and was shoveling along with them with my shovel and ice breaking tool. After about two hours the team all fought with several neighbors to free the truck and have it climb up the ice to the driveway of my house.

BTW: After 25 minutes of being on hold with Verizon waiting for the Tech support person who would reset my username and password I decided that nobody was coming. There is no way to call out from the limbo of being on perpetual hold. So I hung up and tried to call back only to find out that they have subsequently closed for the day.

So after that truck had reached my house I walked the installers into the front door to show them the door to the basement. He looked up at it and then let me know that the model I had purchased was extra long and too long to fit through that door. The only way to get it into the house would be to go through the basement bulkhead. Well after picking at ice for two hours I had no issue with revving up my new snow blower to clear a path to the basement bulkhead. The did so and not only cleared the snow out from the path but also a large amount of green material from the freshly grown fall grass and a large amount of black material from the soil beneath the grass. The installers were impressed with my path to the bulkhead but let me know that they were sub-contractors and weren’t going anywhere near the back of my house until the ice thawed. They recommended spending a few days once it got warmer pouring the quick melt onto the snow in the path and to reschedule to a later date… which is what I have been trying to do for the past couple of days.

So with regards to the rescheduling of the delivery of the elliptical runner I have made great progress. On Monday I reached someone who told me someone would definitely call me back first thing on Wednesday to schedule the delivery. At 4:30 on Wednesday, before I called Verizon, I called back the office and the man who sold me the runner let me know that he wanted to schedule it quickly but the only way to do so was to go through the warehouse. So he had the warehouse call me back. The warehouse then called me to ask me if I was able to take the delivery on Friday of this week. I thought that would be great and then they told me that they would call me back on Thursday (tomorrow) to tell me whether they would be delivering in the morning or the evening on Friday so that I could be available at the house when the delivery people (probably the same ones from last week) would be there.

In all I am 1.5 for 4.

Citibank – Successful card cancellation and new cards in the mail

Verizon – Still don’t know who much I owe them or how to pay them. At least I know what needs to be done if anyone there ever decides to help me.

Boston Sports Clubs/Collections folks – Awaiting confirmation that I actually owe them money and an explanation for the whole deal with the collection agency. A major nasty note to the BBB might be in order since BSC seems to have the worst business policies I have encountered. I will chalk that up to the company being a bunch of steroid using jock idiots.

Gym Source – Almost done. They are the replacement solution to the BSC people. I think they will come through on Friday.

I am seeking new legislation like the stuff they have in China where CEOs or ministers may need to face the death penalty for issues with quality or customer service.