Verizon, The Joy Of

Some companies, not many, but some, manage to provide decent service. Utilities for instance, they generally work pretty well. Communications is another story. Why is that? The technology is always changing, so there are big expenditures going in for new equipment and training. I was going to say we had done away with wires, but that's not true. There are more transoceanic cables than every, and while cellular phones have pretty much replaced land lines, land lines themselves have been superceded by fiberoptics. While cell phones work well for voice, land lines are preferred for data because of their higher carrying capacity. Still, I suspect gross incompetence at work.

We got a $10 charge for some kind of BS on one of our cell phones last month, and I am loath to call Verizon. Last thing I want to do is spend an hour of my life dealing with modern day part man/part machine conglomeration to get a lousy $10 charge removed. So I thought I would try going online, see if I could deal with it there. Got my wife to dig out our User ID & Password for our online account, dialed up Verizon, signed in, and I got this:

What the? Log in again? What is this? I try "residential", and this is what I get:

I've never seen that error message before. I'm going to go find something else to do now.

Update January 2017 replaced missing images.