3 Hours 20 Minutes to Put Internet on Vacation, We Leave in Less than 40 Hours Now

At home in Holiday / Tarpon Springs Area

Today Marcia went to Bible Study, Skruffy and I took a small load to the Motorhome and turned the Fridge on.  At 12:20 Marcia was done, we were waiting for her, and back to the Condo to get more stuff ready.

 

I then took our reclining chair apart, brought in the two wicker chairs that are out on our covered patio area, and went to get the motorhome to put the chairs in.  (above that is Skruffy in her bed between the chairs, her towel on the chair to the left, and my shirt in the chair to the right with my shoes and socks on the floor.)  I could have waited and made this change on Tuesday, but the chairs are not light, and I wanted to split up the work load even though it is 30 minutes there and 30 minute back.  Add in a stop at the store to get spring water and diet tonic water, the whole process took over 3 hours.  Tomorrow I bring the motorhome over again and we load up the refrigerator, the pantry, our clothing, toiletries…just about everything except for one days of clothing and our computers.

Shortly after 8 pm, after we ate a nice dinner, I needed to contact Frontier, our Internet provider, to put our service on vacation.  We got Frontier on November 2016 with the understanding that we can put our account on and off of vacation with no charge each year.  We have a 2 year contract, and the contract years will only count down when we have and pay for service.  We also have a 100 MPS line for the price of 50 MPS…it comes to $65 per month after taxes.

I logged onto the account, then started a chat.  I was unsure which of the four categories they offered was the right one to contact, so I tried billing…and a message said that no one in billing was available during this time period.  I next tried Tech Support, and I immediately connected with Mahala.  Note the time above, it was 8:15 pm. 

One minute later she is transferring me to customer service (an option that was NOT on the list I had to pick from earlier).  Note:  8:16 pm…..

Above you see my last communication with Mahala….8:16 pm.  My next contact was at 11:01 pm.  In between this what I saw was a Queue….first was “You are the 37th person in the queue…” type of message.  SLOWLY the queue got shorter and shorter until Angelica shows up 2 hours and 45 minutes later!

So I reply that over 2 1/2 hours in queue is not what I expected…then went on to provide my account number (which I have taken off the chat above), and that we want vacation time again and the fix of an overpayment from when we came off  vacation back in January.  You see, in January they charged the 100 MPS amount.  However, when I called, they said it was going to be fixed…and future bills did fix this, but I never got credit for the $35 overcharge for January.

Things are moving along now…in just 3 minutes we are down to business, but she asks me the date for vacation despite the fact that I provided that already…

Then there is the “You will be charged…”, at which I told her NO, I was not charged last year, at which point she looks it up, sees that I was not charged, and waves both the one time charge, and the monthly vacation charge.  Ok, now let’s work on the $35 credit from the overbilling…..

So in seven minutes, Angelica has us on vacation starting Friday, and starts working on the $35 overcharge….

Ten minutes later, much of which is dead noise (no communication with her) I finally get her to admit that she is now on queue, at which I can’t help myself and say, “not another 2 1/2 hours I hope….”

At 11:30 she finally gets permission to process the $35 adjustment, after I said, “Look, this is pretty easy….”

Five minutes later she is done with me…it took from 8:15 to 11:35 to get this done.  And I follow her directions, AFTER I get a pdf printout of the chat conversation, and guess what????  There is no survey at the end of it….when I choose “end chat”, chat ends, it goes away, but no survey.  I remember the last time I did a chat with them, I thought I could get a printout of the chat after the survey, and it went to the survey, but I lost the opportunity to print out the chat.  Well, I got this one, and it is on file, and I will use it as I need to in order to get past the extra charges they attempt to throw on you.  Of course, I could change over to cable tv, that is with Brighthouse…but from people say, they are just as bad.  But I have learned my lesson…this contact needs to be done first thing in the morning when the wait is not nearly as long.  But 3 hours and 20 minutes????  That is beyond long….funny when I said, “I have reached beyond my boiling point”, she was able to immediately give me my credit.  Talk about customer service….