snarkwife

Let me get all the key­words in right from the get-​go: Vonage Soft­phone, X-Pro-Vonage soft­ware, Mac OS X crash­ing. Hope­fully some­one out there Googling these things like I did (sadly, too late) will learn from my mistake.

Having said that, I'm get­ting busi­ness cards at work - I requested a box after real­iz­ing I have sig­nif­i­cant net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties both in school and in normal every­day life, and I don't have any cards to hand out. For three years now, my work number has been my home phone number. Very few people have it, so it hasn't been an issue. With busi­ness cards though, I don't want to just ran­domly hand out my home phone number...even if it's dis­guised as a work number. Just having my cell phone number on the card makes me look like a consultant...or I don't have a real office.

Anyway, I thought to myself...why don't I pick up a Soft­phone line from Vonage? I'll drop my "unlim­ited" pro­gram on our main line since we rarely use more than 500 min­utes, then the extra cost of the Soft­phone line will bal­ance us out to about what we were paying before - and I'll have that second line with voice mail and all the other bells and whis­tles. Plus, it will be on my laptop, so maybe I can actu­ally start trav­el­ing with CU once in awhile - since that was sup­pos­edly one of the ben­e­fits of being a mobile worker.

As a respon­si­ble Mac user, I know not every­thing on God's green earth is com­pat­i­ble with my chosen OS, so I checked the tech­ni­cal require­ments - turns out, all I need is Mac OS X ver­sion 10.2 or newer. Fan­tas­tic! I'm run­ning 10.4.10! I sign up for my new Soft­phone (for which I am charged a $9.99 "acti­va­tion fee" for their data­base trig­ger to update a few tables but...bygones), down­load my soft­ware and am ready to go! Sweet!

But...because I am me, I have to test it out. I call CU and ask him to call me on the Soft­phone. He does...my laptop rings...and I answer the call. Suc­cess! We chat for a minute, then I hang up. The appli­ca­tion crashes. Hmm. I restart it and have to go through the login process again. Odd. I call CU this time to check out­bound calls...we chat, then I hang up. The appli­ca­tion crashes. Okay...well...maybe my account just isn't fully set up yet. I ask CU to call back again, this time to check the voice mail. He calls and I sit here lis­ten­ing to my laptop ring. After the fourth ring his call is kicked over to voice mail and...yes my friends...the appli­ca­tion crashes.

Okay then, it's time to call Vonage cus­tomer ser­vice. I do this begrudg­ingly, as my expe­ri­ence with Vonage cus­tomer ser­vice has been iffy to say the least. For­tu­nately, I haven't had to call them in a couple of years because my ser­vice has been on par with what I've been paying them...so no harm, no foul. I get on the phone with 1st-level tech­ni­cal sup­port and, if I have one piece of advice for their train­ing team I would say this: try to train your on-the-phone folks to not sound so robotic when speak­ing from a script. I'm just saying. After going through three levels of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (what is this, my credit card com­pany?), Mr. 1st Level tells me it is likely "an issue with chang­ing my DNS servers to a static state within my account." Uh, shouldn't this soft­ware just be down­load 'n go?

He doesn't have autho­riza­tion to change my DNS servers I guess, and trans­fers me to Ms. 2nd Level who "unfor­tu­nately" has to tell me that "1st level didn't send any of my infor­ma­tion over with the trans­fer," so I go through the three levels of account iden­ti­fi­ca­tion again, and also get to recap all of my crash woes...again. After nine painful min­utes of explain­ing what I am expe­ri­enc­ing (every time she said "soft­phone" it sound like "cell phone" so I was trying to ensure she didn't think I had suc­cess­fully down­loaded this soft­ware onto my iPhone), she decides to clue in and pop a couple of key­words into her knowl­edge­base - hey, son of a gun...turns out the soft­ware does crash on Intel-​chipped Mac­Book Pro lap­tops, and this is a known issue. Not only is it a known issue, but there is no esti­mate on when it will be fixed. "Fan­tas­tic," I say, "Why doesn't your web page say any­thing about how this soft­ware doesn't work on Intel-​chipped Mac­Book Pros?" "I don't know, ma'am." Urgh.

Ms. 2nd Level wants to know if there's any­thing else she can do to help me, and I ask her to send me back to some­one who can cancel my Soft­phone order since it obvi­ously won't work with my hard­ware. She puts me on hold, after saying she might be able to cancel the order for me. She comes back, saying she needs to send me to the Account Man­age­ment depart­ment - "because they're the ones who manage the accounts." Really?

Now, this is where it gets good. I get to the Accounts Man­age­ment rep and explain what hap­pened. Soft­ware doesn't work on my Mac, noth­ing to indi­cate this on their web­site, want a full refund includ­ing the acti­va­tion fee, since I only had the ser­vice for an hour and spent that hour making unsuc­cess­ful test calls on behalf of their app dev group. Okay, I didn't really say that last part. She takes this oppor­tu­nity to try to upsell me on yet another prod­uct that won't work on my OS, then actu­ally says to me that because I am a long-​time cus­tomer, I am con­sid­ered a VIP! Super! Because of my valued VIP status, as a cour­tesy they're going to allow me a one-​time ser­vice acti­va­tion credit for my Soft­phone order can­cel­la­tion. Um, I say, "Why should this be a one-​time thing? It's a known issue within Vonage that your soft­ware doesn't work on my spe­cific laptop. You haven't com­mu­ni­cated that any­where on your web­site so really, you shouldn't be cred­it­ing me the $9.99 as a cour­tesy, you should be doing it because your soft­ware doesn't work."

"Actu­ally ma'am," she says, "Our web­site does clearly state that our soft­ware does not work with all com­put­ers." "Where?" I ask, because I want to know where it says that. She con­de­scend­ingly takes me through the web­site and we wind up on this page...where, I read an hour prior, there was no issue with my spe­cific com­puter. "That doesn't say it won't work on Intel-​chipped Mac­Book Pros," I tell her, "It just gives the min­i­mum oper­at­ing system require­ments, which I meet."

"Look," I con­tinue, "As long as I get my credit I really don't care. But, if other unsus­pect­ing Mac users come to this page and think they can use the Soft­phone, then order a number and down­load the soft­ware only to expe­ri­ence the same crash­ing prob­lems I did - it's really unrea­son­able to expect them to suck up the acti­va­tion fee." With this, she goes back up to the top of the script and starts over from the begin­ning, com­plete with the rhetoric about how because I'm a valued Vonage cus­tomer, they will waive the acti­va­tion fee just this one time (and yes, she said it just like it was ital­i­cized). I told her to screw off (no, I didn't) and then called CU to vent for twenty min­utes about shitty cus­tomer ser­vice and how it was time to unload our Vonage service.

CU had a heck of a time reach­ing me last night, too. Appar­ently the phone would ring sev­eral times and then he'd get an "all cir­cuits are busy" mes­sage. Now, I was next door at our new neighbor's house (more on that later) - but you have to wonder if some­one didn't flip a switch, at least temporarily.

Boo, Vonage...and shame on you!