I have been putting off writing this post intentionally. You see, I was still basking in the glow of a fantastic install experience. I didn’t want to dredge up, and subsequently address, all the problems that have occurred since the fiber was lit. Over the past week and a half, I have been living the fantasy of being an “ordinary consumer”. The average Fios customer would most certainly use Verizon STB’s, would not be porting their phone line from a Voip provider (silly me!), and would be thrilled that their internet “still worked”. But lets be honest, we all know that I’m anything but ordinary. I seek perfection. I expect things to “work”. I complain. I write letters. I am the equivalent of a technological obsessive compulsive. Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you the “post-install experience”…
As instructed, I visit the activatemyfios.verizon.net website. What an exciting URL! Let me take a moment to explain what this site actually does. It is a revenue generator for Verizon. Force feeding you data protection plans, antivirus, spam filtering and rustproofing. But I couldn’t even get that far. Before you begin down that journey of “No thanks” and “I’ll install it later” you have to pass the dreaded account setup screen. What happened next infuriated me. The account setup progress is obviously too complex to be handled by a web browser alone. It attempts to install a Firefox extension. OK, I’ll play along. I allow the extension to download only to find out that it is incompatible with Firefox 3.0. Wonderful… Let’s try Safari. Well, not so fast Mr. consumer. We DEMAND that you allow us to ruin your life. It recognizes that I’m on a mac and instructs me to download and run an application! I’m desperate to finish this process, so I actually allow this to happen. The app loads, and freezes. It is at this point where I see just how clever the Verizon development team is. The application apparently has some sort of “reload on quit” setting. Ah, fun! I quit, the icon bounces away and start right up again. Force quit… no luck, it relaunched and haunts me over and over. Shut down and restart the system. “I’m sorry, the system can not be shutdown at this time because the application ‘Verizon Fios Installer’ is still running.” Are you kidding me?
I can’t believe I’m now booting up Vista to do something my Mac couldn’t handle. This is embarrassing and it’s all Verizon’s fault. Now, I know I can just skip the Firefox step, as I’m running the same version here on Vista. I punch in the URL in good ole Internet Explorer. OK, kiddies, can we guess what it wants to do now? The IE warning bar slides down to alert me about an ActiveX Control installation. (Now that I’ve actually completed this ridiculous step, let me point something out. NOTHING that I did required any of these advanced controls and software installations. I created an account, answered a few questions and watched a fancy “Welcome to Verizon Fios” video. This is clearly a case of over-development by Verizon. Even if software needed to be installed, you can provide download links. A simple web guided setup and intro would have been more than enough, and it would have worked right out of the gate, regardless of OS and browser.)
Once that nightmare is over, the first thing you are required to do, is create a verizon.net email address. Now, maybe it’s just me, but do we really still rely on our ISP’s to provide email services? I can remember a day when things like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were shunned. But in todays internet, webmail providers, whether free or fee, are far superior to the slim offerings of our Cable and DSL providers. Anyway, I proceed to setup the account, thinking this is the only conduit to seeing my account management and billing screen. I find a few more errors along the way but finally… I’m in! I click over to “My Account”. Humm… Nothing really here, just shows that I have internet and no email waiting. There’s various settings for Spam filtering in addition to some widgets about the whether and todays news. How do I check my plan, my upcoming bill, etc? I’m puzzled. I’m on the horn with Verizon the following day.
Me — “I’ve logged into the ActiveMyFios site, but I can’t find my account info”
Verizon Rep — “Oh, billing is not on this site, you have to go to Verizon.com”
Me — “So, what the hell did I just sign up for?”
Verizon Rep — “Thats just the internet home page”
Are you freaking kidding me? The last thing I want is multiple accounts to manage my Fios. I then find my way to Verizon.com (we were on .net before). I do the account setup dance again. Yes, another login id, another password. This site is much cleaner, but still has its own errors. To this day, I can’t see that I have anything installed. An “ecenter” rep told me that I won’t be able to see anything on this site until my first bill generates. I am actually laughing at this point. I’ve been able to sign up for Sprint at the store, and by the time I got home, all my plan details were on the website. I guess Verizon isn’t as advanced?
See the following post for the next exciting chapter - the phone porting issue.
ARGH! Leave me alone!!!