Telling them all to go to hell

 I am normally, well, most of the time, a calm, easy going person. I try to live my life simply. I don't ask a lot of the people I know, much less, the ones I don't.

This makes me wonder why we are so easily swayed to become yes men or women to companies that we pay to provide some service or another. 

I get a discount with Verizon because I am a teacher. I received a letter yesterday telling me I needed to update my account so I could continue to received my discount. I tried to call Verizon and was put on so many computerized accounts who could call me by name but could not help me. They kept sending me texts and all I wanted was to speak to a human, a real one, not a computer generated one. At one point I was yelling in the phone to speak to a human. Of course, that got me nowhere. 

I was finally sent to a live, data person who could only respond by message, he/she could not call and speak to me but I could clink on another link and set up an appointment for them to call me at my convenience. Huh? My convenience is NOW. I will sit on hold for a couple of minutes to speak to a live person. I don't mind. It is much easier to tell someone the issue than to have to try and type it out on a phone pad with little letters when you are older and don't see as well as you used to. 

I finally threatened to call their competitor and change to them before they put me in contact with a real person. This frustration had gone on for almost 30 minutes. My threat to change carriers finally did the trick. After letting their customer service person know how angry I was with them and why, I received my discount and assurances there would be an option to stay on hold to speak to a real person. We will see.

The same thing happened with my house insurance. Many people believe they will lose their insurance if they have certain breeds of dogs. So do like I did. Tell them to cancel it. You can get insurance. I promise. Whoever owns your loan will make sure. You may have to pay a little more but it can be found. I refused to fill out this stupid form from my insurance wanting to know what kind of dog/dogs I had. Now they don't insure against dog bites. So why in the heck do they need to know that? I refused and they never sent me anything like that again. I still have the same insurance. They still cover the same thing.

I think we have somehow grown in to a group of people who are scared of so many things. I don't quite understand why people won't stand up for themselves. I am not talking about suing people but just every day no. I won't do that, answer that, etc. 

As long as my money is supporting your business, I can say no. I still have that right.