Back to dial-up

Not to be outdone by Iomega and Earthlink in providing customer dissatisfaction, Verizon recently solved the problem of overbilling me for DSL by shutting it off. To further enhance my Verizon experience, they will not be able to re-provision me until July 18th. This because their provisioning database (I think it's dBase III or possibly a gigantic Lotus spreadsheet) doesn't allow reprovisioning of a deleted account until said account is purged from the system. Which only happens Thursdays. If I check the calendar, by the time my service is back up I will have seen 4 Thursdays without DSL. But the last customer service rep I spoke gently chastised me, telling me that my every call to Verizon caused helpless customer service reps to screw up my account further by deleting and re-entering new orders in the provisioning database (spreadsheet?).

When you think about it, the whole thing is my own fault for a) complaining that Verizon was charging me $99.90/month for $49.95/month service, and b) repeatedly requesting that the service be restored.

The good news is that in the meantime I'm using Free Connect, although the max speed of 44,000bps is a little slow for your average media-rich surfing experience. But I'm not complaining; I'm not paying for it and it always works.