Verizon... Seriously, More Verizon!

I know that everyone is probably tired of my Verizon rants, but good god, they just keep giving me things to rant about! Yesterday, I talked about their little unlimited long distance plan they were pushing that cost the same in this area as everywhere else, despite not being able to fulfill all the features. What I neglected to mention is that switching to that particular plan and dropping AT&T as the long distance carrier will save us some serious money, and at the time of writing yesterday, we had already put in the order for it. Yes, I hate Verizon, but I also hate spending more money than I have to. What a horrible predicament. So, Verizon says that they will take care of everything, and get us switched over from AT&T within 24 hours. They actually called us within 6 hours and said the service was all set up. We took this under advisement, but really had no need to make any long distance calls that day. Today however, we did need to make a long distance call, and guess what. Seriously, guess... OH YEAH, didn't work! Amazingly, Verizon has reached a new level of incompetence. 30 hours after they said the service would be ready in 24 hours, and 24 hours after they actually called us up and told us it was ready to go, it's not. I've gotten ahead of myself though. It's not a matter of when I attempt to make a long distance call that I hear an AT&T tone or something. No! When a long distance call is attempted, we get the three tones of death and the message that the number we are calling from has been disconnected, and that for assistance we should call customer service. Local calls still work fine, as do toll-free and EAS, but long distance doesn't. Wonderful! It's one day into the new calling plan with unlimited long distance, and Verizon has found a way to completely disable long distance. I guess that's one way to guarantee that it is a flat fee. So, we called Verizon. They claim that their records show that everything was switched over successfully, and that our service should be working. Well, their records are wrong. So, they pull the classic Verizon move, and instead of doing anything now, they say they'll get it fixed within 24 hours. They also made reference to the other pending service call which I put in the 17th and they are scheduled to respond to on the 31st. They suggest it may be related. Really? Our poor quality ground lines are the cause of Verizon disabling our long distance service? Wow. After we finished with them, the next course of action was to call AT&T and see what was up on their end. Amazingly, Verizon had never contacted AT&T about us changing our service. So, I had to break it to them that we were dropping their service in favor of the cheaper and vastly inferior Verizon. I also explained what was going on at the current time. She said that she would start the process on their end, but Verizon controls the big switch that determines who our carrier is. She was the most helpful person I talked to all day, and gave me the toll free number 1-700-555-4141. Calling this number will reveal to you who your long distance carrier is. Brilliant! So, I called it up, expecting to hear one of three choices: AT&T, Verizon, or that I don't have a carrier. What I heard was one of the most WTF inspiring moments of the day: MCI! It repeated a message twice thanking me for having MCI One Plus service and then it rang twice before giving me the three tones of death and the error message mentioned earlier. Now, I'm aware of the whole Verizon/MCI buyout deal, but I had Verizon long distance on the line in my trailer in Carbondale in 2002, long before they started their buyout of MCI. Thus, I know they had their own long distance service, so why are they trying to hook us up with remnant MCI, and more importantly, why doesn't it work? So... can anybody lend me two cups and a whole hell of a lot of string? -- -Big Cray: Accept No Substitute