#Frontier, I'm breaking up with you.

The first thing you need to know about me is that I pretty much live in a bubble. Let me explain.

As an Author I spend countless of hours with imaginary people. As a reader, I spend countless of hours with imaginary people. Notice the trend? So when I’m with my family, phones are banned and thus the internet is banned.

So back in April when it seemed that everyone knew that Verizon was selling Fios to Frontier Communications in Cali, Texas and Florida, I had no idea. No email was ever sent to the account associated with the account. And I wasn’t clever enough to go around Verizon’s website poking for emails etc.

I found out about the sale of Fios when I tried to pay my bill. Pretty soon, Verizon left me behind, without a goodbye; even though I thought we had a real relationship that started when we moved back to Florida in 2011, actually our love affair didn’t start until 2012, my bad. Still, I thought it was true love. I thought we had an understanding. I paid on time, and in return I had a kick ass package with BBC America included.

Alas this wasn’t true. I felt like the dumped girlfriend on Valentine’s day. Why? Because pretty soon I found out that my rebound lover, a.k.a. Frontier was nothing like Verizon. The relationship built in the space of four years was destroyed, and I knew, Frontier and I couldn't ever have that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

At first I wondered why people were upset. It's a new relationship, I thought, there are bound to be some hiccups, I told myself.  Yes, it took almost two solid weeks for me to be able to access my account and pay my bill… but hey, they’d just done a massive thing. They’d merged. I mean obviously in the time of technological advances, the ever mighty computers could be defeated by such a thing, right? There were bound to be teething problems and as long as my internet didn’t suffer and I could watch BBC America, I was happy.

However, this stage of denial didn’t last long. Internet started to be… well crap. And then the box in my son’s bedroom, the one that housed the old Verizon rechargeable battery started to beep at all hours. I took a deep breath and called Frontier about the battery. They, like Verizon before them, wanted us to pay a ridiculous amount of money for said battery. So I ordered one from Amazon at a fraction of the cost and installed it. The new battery did nothing but beep as well.

Three days later, it was all over.

Friday afternoon our TV and Internet stopped working. WHAT? Yes, it was like I was 10 all over again, and was stuck in 1984.

After calling Frontier we were told that there was an outage in Temple Terrace… we live nowhere near Temple Terrace. I tried explaining that we had problems with the battery, and the woman told us, not to fear, Frontier was here, or there, fixing the outage. I asked of course about the TV, because we’d been without internet before, but our TVs worked. “No,” The almost Disney like voice said on the other end. “You wouldn’t have TV because your internet is out, however, we’re working diligently to make sure that our customers have service as soon as possible.”

And then there was Saturday. No internet. No TV.

This wasn’t a huge problem for my kids. One quickly got busy filming and editing. The youngest one drew and made animals out of construction paper and loads of tape. I spent time reading a book, and playing with some ideas, which also included playing with my Sims' Game.

However, my husband was more bothered than any of us by the lack of internet. He tried dealing with Frontier. First the man on the phone was rude. Second, he transferred him around bouncing the call from department to department, until I got fed up with the way people were talking to him and butted in.

The third person on the phone told him that maybe we should take the battery out. Maybe you just need to reboot…. Maybe if you turn off the equipment…. Maybe the battery hasn’t charged fully… Maybe, Maybe, Maybe!

Well hell no! Enough.

You see, I have a very short fuse. Some people blame my Spanish DNA, but there are so many bits in my DNA from other countries (Including Italy) that I don’t want to blame just the Spanish for my hot temper. Other people pin it down to me being a Gemini. I might have two personalities… both of them are hot tempered. I think the problem is that as I’ve gotten older, I just turned 42 in May, I’m less likely to put up with bad service, especially when my husband works darn hard to earn the money that keeps a roof over our heads and of course pays for the internet and TV. Also, after being married to this saint of a French man for seventeen years, I’m like a lioness jumping in, butting in and pushing rude people out of his way.

And that is precisely what Frontier was like.

I’m sorry Frontier, it’s not me, it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.

Once I took control of the conversation, I asked for a disconnect. You know, I wanted to just freeze Frontier out of my life. Some people think this is just drastic. Well, some break ups are. And you know what; it doesn’t make them any less painful.

Pain? You might ask. Yes, pain. I had to call back when the woman on the other end decided that what we needed was a technician who might come on Wednesday or Friday. I told her not to bother booking. I wanted to be connected with Sales so I could cancel our account, she went ahead and made an appointment and then disconnected my call.

Fast forward to speaking with two different people about cancelling and no one being able to actually tell us how much money we would have to pay to get rid of Frontier, because this is the state of business right now. They don’t know a thing.

From $200 the last girl quoted us $50, though it might be $100. It’s like a  bloody auction out there. Our contract would have expired in October, and as such, we were told that we wouldn’t be charged more than $100. Though I don’t believe Frontier, not one bit. 

Why? Well, technicians around Tampa seem not to show up for appointments. Frontier seems to add charges to people’s bills without explanation. Also, right after cancelling on Saturday and asking for three boxes to mail the two set up boxes and the router… on Wednesday, we had a technician show up and … AND six boxes showed up. You might wonder why am I annoyed that six boxes showed up when I requested three? Well, each one of the six boxes had equipment in it. 

Yup, that’s right, the levels of incompetence reach well beyond bad telephone manners, not being able to give you a time frame for an appointment, not being able to know that the equipment in your house is actually faulty and that there is no outage, and especially not being able to be transparent about their cancellation fees. 

The odyssey doesn’t stop there. Today, Thursday, when I returned home from running errands, there was one more box on the porch, from… You guessed it, Frontier!

*throws confetti around*

So yes, Dear Frontier, you were my rebound love, and as such our story has concluded, because in all seriousness, it’s not me, it’s you.