Verizon FIOS: Support Still Sucks

Up until now, my connection has been perfect. It rarely goes down, and that's only around midnight every six weeks or so for just a couple of minutes.

This time, however, my connection spontaneously died at 7pm, came back a few minutes later, and missed me off to no end as only half of the web destinations I tried actually worked. I could get to Google, but not Microsoft. This site, but not gmail.

My own standard troubleshooting didn't fix the problem, so I let the connection sit overnight and called tech support in the morning. It roughly went like this:

Phone guy: WelcometofiossupporthisisJustinhowcanIhelpyou?

Me: Hi there, my connection died for a few minutes last night. When it came back, I could only reach about half of my web destinations. For example, I could get to Google, but not Microsoft. I did some basic troubleshooting and didn't have any luck.

Justin: mmhmm. Hang on a second while I check your area ...

waiting for about two minutes listening to each other breathe ...

Justin: alright, it looks like there's an outage in your area that should be fixed by 3:23pm.

Me: An outage that only affects my ability to get to certain sites? That seems kind of weird.

Justin: I don't have any further information, except that you should expect resolution at 3:23pm.

Me: Alright. Is that central or pacific time?

Justin: It doesn't say, so I don't know.

Me: Wow. Okay then. So there's no troubleshooting steps we should go through? You don't want to check my router?

Justin: No that's alright. 3:23pm. Today.

Me: Okay then. Thanks for your ... help.

Justin: Thanks for calling. *click*

Wow. Way to make me feel completely unimportant there, Justin. But, to Justin's credit, not more than 30 seconds after I hung up the phone my connection started working properly! Outage, huh? That's what I thought.

I didn't believe Justin's outage claim, and for good reason. I've done a lot of tech support in my time and claiming an "outage" is standard procedure when you're not supposed to admit something ... like your company fucked something up.

Oh well. My connection is good as new and running smoothly, so I guess this isn't so bad.

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