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Monday, February 2, 2015

Verizon's joke tech support & my broke Samsung S5

I woke up one morning recently and found that the screen of my new Samsung Galaxy S5 looked like this:

I also found that while I could move the black barred rectangular graphic that said "Overlay #1:1260x720, 213 dpi, secure" around with my finger, and even resize it. I couldn't get rid of it.

Verizon is my carrier, so naturally I called Verizon Wireless tech support. Was that ever a waste of time!

Three times I navigated their voice prompt maze to finally get a live person who put me on hold and eventually hung up on me. Beyond power cycling the device and removing the battery, solutions which I had already tried before I called, the only other option I was offered was to remove all my apps and user data and reset the phone to the factory defaults in the blind hope that that would fix the problem because they had never seen or heard of this problem before and had no idea what was causing it.

They were sure that it wasn't their problem however. Even though it affected all screens all the time, they said it must be caused by a third party app that I downloaded from the Google Play Store. They said just start deleting apps till it went away. No, they had no idea what app might be causing it but definitely not one of their built in ad-bloat apps that you can't delete anyway. Definitely must be a third party app. You know that Google Play Store. Anybody can upload to it. All kinds of viruses and worms...

Or call Samsung, they made the phone. Here's Samsung's number. I called Samsung and I got put on hold there too. Once I even called Verizon and they got a Samsung tech and transferred me but he lost me too. When they lose you, you never have a way to get back to the same person and pick up the same conversation, and of course, they never call you back, even though you know perfectly well they have your number.

Later I went on Twitter to gripe, and since all of these corporations have a social-media team that looks out for such things, it wasn't long before I picked up a response. What follows is my Twitter conversation with Verizon over the next few days. I still don't have my phone fixed. Verizon has never really tried to fix it, only to pass the buck and avoid responsibility. I have learned to work around it but somehow, I still feel I am being cheated.

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But they do bill my wireless charges on that same landline bill.

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