Sometimes the quickest path to victory is surrender

After moving, we got DSL hooked back up in our nice new house. I noticed that my speeds were a lot slower than in our old place, so I decided to check and see what speed the new house was provisioned at.

1.5mbps. Hmm. Since I'm paying for the 3mbps package (which I was getting in the old house, four blocks further from the central office), I decided to call up Verizon and argue the point.

After spending an hour getting bounced between Customer Service, Billing, and Tech Support (located in India, the Virgin Islands, and Georgia, respectively), I was getting nowhere. Customer Service said "we can't help you", Billing said "the order won't go through for some reason", and Tech Support declared "it's physically impossible" to upgrade my speed. My quest for doubled bandwidth was not going well.

On a whim, I said "Okay, I'd like to cancel my account."

Off to Cancellations (more properly known as Customer Retention), which has much nicer hold music. It took all of thirty seconds for the nice young man on the other end to look at my records and upgrade my service to 3mbps. And he gave me a free month of service, with his apologies.

Within twenty minutes my DSL reconnected, and I was suddenly flying along at 3 tasty megabits per second (thanks, DSLReports!). Next time I'm just threatening to cancel as soon as I get a live human on the line.

"Physically impossible", my ass.