jrtom

fdmts, this one's for you.

(I've left out the original email, but it should be clear from context what was being discussed.)

On 10 Jan 2006, at 14:20, VZW Customer Service SW wrote:

I thank you for your suggestion regarding the blank pages. The pages are used to clearly separate sections of the bill and to avoid confusion that may occur if the sections were not separated. I apologize for any inconvenience the additional pages may cause.

Verizon is the only organization that I have ever encountered that considers the section separation to be a problem (including carriers that put both long distance and wireless billing on the same bill). The separation seems clear enough to me without requiring blank pages.

Regarding the missing text on page two of the bill, it appears the text in question is the last letter of a few words of text. If you are unable to discern a word due to the missing letter, simply use the text function in your PDF reader to copy the page two text and copy it to a word processor document. The full text is there, it is simply covered by the page border and/or scroll bar function.

This does work in some PDF readers, although not all of them. (It is not related to the scroll bar position, although it's a good guess that when the PDF was generated, the margins were set incorrectly with respect to the page size.)

However, I consider it odd that in your previous paragraph you stated that Verizon was going so far as to place multiple blank pages so as to make your bills more clear...and yet when I bring up an issue in which there the current document creation process has an easily correctable bug which results in reduced clarity, your response is to suggest that I work around it, rather than suggesting that Verizon will fix the problem.

I would not characterize your response as being customer-service-oriented.

Finally, you can rest assured the 'Usage Type' field is properly identifying all call usage types. Call Forwarding coverers a much broader range than simply forwarding your number to another number. Call Forwarding is involved in voicemail calls, incoming calls, and out of area calls. I apologize for any confusion, however there is nothing to worry about with the 'F' rated calls.

This may be partially true, although it is certainly the case that not all voicemail-related, or incoming, calls have the 'F' tag. Nevertheless, it simply confirms my assertion that using the phrase "Call Forwarding"--which is also used to describe a specific service provided by Verizon as well as other carriers--for this purpose is a bad idea: it's confusing and misleading. The best evidence that I have for this may be had by listening to the recording of my customer service call from yesterday, in which I attempted to get an answer to this question; it took about 10-15 minutes for a Verizon employee, in consultation with a colleague, to come up with the _wrong answer_ (assuming that your answer is correct).

In short, if Verizon customer service employees can't even figure this out, it's a bad idea to use this convention. I don't imagine that it would be hard to come up with an appropriate non-conflicting phrase.