Venting About Verizon

Greetings!: 

There are some practices carried out by Verizon, the telephone company which has been servicing the area in which I live of late, with which I am displeased,
and thus I write to comment on them. 

Let us take them in reverse order, with the latest first.  Just over a week ago I had trouble with my telephone, I sometimes being unable to get a dial
tone or, when I could, getting varying degrees of static on the line.  _THANKFULLY_ the problem lay in a cable outside of my building (I am conjecturing
that this could have resulted from the torential rains we had in June, though others on my floor did not have this problem), and thus I was spared the
high fee which would have resulted had repairs been required here in my unit.  When the work was done, the man who did it rang to inform me thereof, and
I thought that would be the end of it.  But then, some days later, I received an automated message to the same effect which went on to tell me that, should
I wish to find out how I could put my service to better use or something on the order of that, I should ring a certain telephone number.  Had this latter
been the _ONLY_ notice I received, I could conceivably have been without service for several unnecessary days had I somehow decided to await such notice.
 Do you not agree with me that the notice I received from the repair man just after the work was done was sufficient?  If I wished to do any upgrading,
might I not have checked into it myself, it presumably now being common knowledge that various extra features, e.g., call-forwarding and call-waiting,
are available and have been for many years?  And then there are the recorded weather forecasts.  Before we are allowed to get to these, we must be subjected
to an advertisement about Verizon DSL which, we are told, will allow us "to move at the speed of (our) ambition."  _MY_ ambition, when telephoning for
the weather, is to _GET_ _ON_ _WITH_ that, not having to wait to hear about DSL!  And, since no prices are given there for that service, what is to tempt
the potential customer?  Does not Verizon stop to think that, while advertising is regretably more and more a fact of life these days, putting one at the
beginning of a telephone weather forecast might annoy in an assumed majority of cases (unless I am misjudging the average public), not draw potential customers? 

Here admittedly cometh my laziness again, but does anyone reading this know if Verizon's recent take-over of MCI was due to that company's possible failure
(which I actually seem to somewhat recall being the case) or an expansionist move on their part?  And, going back further to a time when I was absent from
this area when Verizon took over from C.&P. (Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company), our telephone server for many years, was that take-over friendly
or hostile?  If both were hostile, this would incline me to call those advertisements I described as power-grasping, this company seeming to me to want
to take over every telephone company in its path.  For those familiar with anti-trust law, when do such practices violate that? 

As I write this post, I continue to think about what I wrote above about advertising being more and more a fact of life these days.  Lest we neglect this
blog's basic proposition, it occurs to me to also add that when dignity, decency and deference were more prominent than they are nowadays, advertisement
was _THANKFULLY_ less so, though admittedly still present.  Thus I hope all of this babbling has not been unfounded.  I submit it for what it is worth,
and, should any decide to comment, may we all learn something from whatever discussion might ensue!  At _VERY_ least, as with my "Apple Juice" thread,
etc., this will provide some variety from all my posts about the military and music! 

Hoping this finds my visitors well, 

J. V.