A reminder that Verizon sucks

[ms_0]

So, I tried to pay my Verizon bill online today, but when I signed in to their website, I got the cute little red and blue rotating icon under billing info, and it just stayed there forever. I tried logging in several times, all with the same result. Eventually I tried a different browser, with the same problem, except there was an indication of an error on the page. So I went back to firefox and turned on firebug, discovered a sequence of javascript errors. At this point I tried to figure out how to contact Verizon, and I couldn't find a phone number for them!, but I tried their online chat. I quickly got to chat with an agent, who, after asking the usual security questions, immediately told me she had converted my MyVerizon page to the latest version, and asked me to sign out and sign back in. Sure enough, the new version worked fine. So how come Verizon had left me with a non-working webpage? Are they sadistic marketeers, or just incompetent? (Let's see how long our users tolerate our broken website before complaining. If we can calibrate this, we'll know how much we can screw each of them when it really matters!)
I normally espouse the tenet Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.