The past six weeks have seen a whirlwind of activities in my personal life, due to all of the changes I've enjoined.  The move brought a bevy of unexpected issues, which have taken considerable time to resolve.  The standout by far has been the situation with Bell Atlantic.
You would think that a well established company like Bell Atlantic, upon whom so many are dependent on a daily basis, would have a more....enlightened approach to serving customers well.

We thought it was a simple request.  My wife and I each had separate apartments in Manhattan.  We both had 1 personal voice line each, and 1 high speed data line each; she had DSL to her Apple G3, I had ISDN to my Netgear router, which served my SPARC station, an old Win95 system and a couple of laptops.  We told Bell Atlantic we were getting married, closing our old apartments, and moving in together in a new space.  And simply put, all we wanted was what we had - 1 personal voice line each, and 1 high speed data line each, just as we had before the move.  We just wanted the service from the two apartments to be moved to the new apartment, so we could live together and still use the equipment we'd been using.  But what was in the beginning a simple order has turned out to be a nightmare:  voice-mail-menu hell, a rash of broken service appointments, switched phone lines, inaccurate billing, threats of disconnect if we didn't just shut up and pay.  And to date, still no empowered representative from Bell Atlantic has called to resolve any of the issues we've reported, despite the fact that we've escalated to the highest levels of appeal.  Between the two of us, we've probably spoken to 25 Bell Atlantic representatives since we began this process, none of which was willing to take responsibility for ensuring that we had a resolution path.  We've spent probably 50 hours between us on the phone, most of the time waiting on hold, the rest of the time explaining to yet another Bell Atlantic representative our situation.  And each time we tried again, it was as though Bell Atlantic had no memory.  If we couldn't resolve a specific issue one day, we had to call again the next and begin the process again.

As of today, my wife's DSL is finally working -- for a few days there, we were actually getting someone else's voice mail on her DSL line -- and my ISDN works but not like it did in my old place (I can't use outgoing DOVBS, which essentially means I have to pay a lot more for ISDN than I did in my old place).  And it's taken us a full 6 weeks.  Would you believe that at one point we were asked to wait all day for Bell Atlantic service reps to come who never came -- two days in a row!  Suffice it to say, it's been a nightmare.

Time-Warner, our cable television provider, has been a dream by comparison.  Time-Warner advertises a free month of service if their service people aren't on time.  Time-Warner has been incredibly responsive by comparison.  Time-Warner advertises their RoadRunner cable-modem service in Manhattan.  When it gets to my neighborhood, Bell Atlantic is history in this household -- at least as far as broadband is concerned.