I’ve spent the past 55 minutes alternating between fruitless conversation and repeatedly being put on hold by Centurylink (formerly known as Qwest). I’m in a supposed 10 minute wait queue now, so I figured I’d use my time to jot down a few… thoughts. See, I took a neighbors advice and gave the company a second chance at providing me with service. I learned from this experience that not everyone deserves a second chance—especially not those who try to obfuscate the truth of their terrible service by changing their name.
Qwest sucked.
They constantly ranked in consumer reports worst five customer service companies. The internet was often as bad as the service, with repeated outages and intermittent signal strength. I was a qwest customer but only because they were the only game in town. Once Cox rolled in, I rolled out of Qwest. Cox lived up to the homonym quite well, but despite the oft abusive treatment, it was better than Qwest.
Years later I moved on and out to a town that offered me other options. I went local, signing with Orbitel communications and leaving TV to DirectTV. Things were good for a while until Orbitel started dinking around with upgrades and ended up (accidentaly?) downgrading their services to customers operating below 50 mbps. That service degredation along with the exorbitant ($60) price for 20 mbps tempted me to listen to my neighbor and give qwest-redux a try.
Now I’m on the phone trying to figure out why I owe these folks $197.00 after a month of service—which has been suspended as of now because they claim I haven’t paid them. I did. They cashed the check. And lost it in the system. So, now they want more money and refuse to turn on my service. That’s why I wasn’t able to publish last night. That’s why I’m blogging my rant right now …
Avoid Centurylink. Save yourself the drama.