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Verizon Denies DSL Because of Subscriber's Name
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 03, 2008 04:43 AM
from the gravel-in-ya-guts-and-the-spit-in-ya-eye dept.
from the gravel-in-ya-guts-and-the-spit-in-ya-eye dept.
mikek2 writes "When retired Philadelphia-area doctor and Vietnam veteran Dr. Herman I. Libshitz went to upgrade his dial-up connection to Verizon DSL, he was informed they wouldn't complete the order because his last name contained an expletive. Repeated calls to several levels of management at Verizon failed to resolve the problem, with several managers suggesting he change his last name. It all worked out in the end, after the Philadelphia Enquirer intervened."
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Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time someone will claim that monopolies' power over the market does not negate the very mechanism that is supposed to implement the market, refer him to this.
Then punch him in the face.
Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, and someone else said SpeakEasy is a competitor in his area, and they provide better service.
"Monopoly"? You didn't even check; you just want to bitch about big business.
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Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
"Monopoly" is defined in terms of a marketplace. If consumers don't have a practical alternative to a supplier, then that is a monopoly. The presence of impractical alternatives is irrelevant. It only Toyota were allowed to sell cars and small trucks, it would be a monopoly, no matter how many people bought Peterbilt rigs.
Another detail: the landline companies clearly do have a monopoly on the copper "last-mile" networks that all DSL providers use. In theory, these networks are equally available to all ISPs. But by an amazing coincidence, the dominant ISP in any given market is always the one that belongs to the local landline company. that's just not consistent with the idea that the DSL market is "open".
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Re:the name fits here (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing inherently liberal or socialist about objecting to monopoly power. Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
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Re:the name fits here (Score:5, Insightful)
Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work.
The markets - and capitalism - go on working all right, but not along the lines of Adam Smith's fairy-tale "hidden hand". Oh no.
Free markets go either of two ways. Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM. Or else governments step in to regulate them, in a process that soon comes to resemble the Ptolemaic system of astronomy - adjustments to adjustments to adjustments, while the whole thing becomes steadily less stable and credible.
Our current system is a compromise between raw capitalism and socialism. You can argue that it has the strengths of both, or the weaknesses of both, or both. One aspect that has recently hit the headlines is the tendency to privatise profits and nationalise losses, thus giving rich speculators a free run at even greater wealth.
Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?
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Re:the name fits here (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work
I took a class in high school called 'social justice', which was ran by a very liberal teacher who said that communism works -- but only on a small scale and only if nobody cheats.
It turns out he was right. But that goes for any theory of economics.
Capitalism, socialism, it doesn't matter what system you use. The fact is that turn out that none of the theories and schools of economics work the way that economists theorize them. In the end, there will always be those who will find out how to abuse the system and those people will abuse it.
In the end, the only way to make any system work is to punish the cheaters.
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Re:the name fits here (Score:5, Insightful)
I agreed with your entire post, until this line at the end.
You are assuming a correlation that just isn't there.
To get a system to work, you want to reduce crime, and contrary to right wing beliefs, being hard on criminals doesn't deter people noticeably. Making easier available alternatives to crime works. Having meaningful rehabilitation of criminals works to prevent recidivism. But punishment doesn't really help -- it only causes criminals to go to greater lengths not to be caught.
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Re:the name fits here (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, but then it's not punishment that is doing something good, but separation.
Punishment's only purpose is slaking people's thirst for vengeance. A harsher punishment doesn't reduce the amount of crime -- that's a false belief. If anything, it causes criminals to take more desperate measures not to get caught. If prison is a horrible place, people will do more to stay out of it, up to and including arson or killing witnesses or police. But not including staying lawful. Getting caught is something that happens to others, not oneself.
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false (Score:5, Insightful)
All markets are regulated.
The free market does not exist and idealistically never has existed.
Somebody enforces and writes the rules by which the markets run; which INCLUDES fundamental things like ownership, law enforcement, a legal system...
Even the most free markets-- the black markets are defined by law (indirectly) and how those laws are enforced.
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Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times? People in the billing department... people in different parts of the country... people who suggested he Misspell his name, change his name, etc...
It wasn't until the press got involved that someone said "Well, this needs personal attention." Which is odd because he was talking to people all along, aside from the initial online signup attempt.
However, if as Verizon says, this can be worked around because it is indeed their name... why couldn't anyone else that this doctor spoke to offer him the same appropriate treatment? So, since Verizon could have fixed this all along but did not until the press got involved... it was not *just* a crude obscenity filter on the email address he wanted when he signed up.
I've got to wonder what his email address was with AT&T, since he was using AT&T for dialup first.
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Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Funny)
So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times?
I once had the misfortune to be a customer of an ISP with such an attitude. They'd essentially installed an obscenity filter on all their staff and if you said anything which tripped the filter, they'd put the phone down on you.
What made this particularly galling was that the service they were selling was filtered internet access for the benefit of the sort of organisation that wants one - schools, mainly. So you ring them up to say "There's a problem with your filter - it lets me visit www.hotteensluts.com" and they've hung up on you before you can finish the sentence.
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Re:Monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
They had a crude obscenity filter because a monopoly doesn't need a better one. There is no economic incentive for them to spend the resources on things like that. They can't lose customers no matter how badly they treat them.
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Change of name (Score:5, Funny)
In the end he changed his name to "Harold I. Libshitz" and everything finally went through.
Re:Change of name (Score:5, Funny)
I remember it as a skit from a Monty Python or Not The Nine o'Clock News or something from that era. The joke is probably much older. It goes something like:
A man walks into the office of the department of name changes:
Man: I'd like to change my name please
Clerk: Okay, what is your name?
Man: Colin Tittybumface
Clerk: I see. And what would you like to change your name to?
Man: Roger Tittybumface
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Most famous Lipshitz (Score:5, Informative)
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
So, let me see if I have this straight: Verizon wanted someone to change their last name in order to get DSL, and that person didn't do it??? What, are you going to get a cablemodem or something? Just change your name, already. This is internet connectivity we're talking about here. It's important. It isn't like you haven't been getting libshitz for yoru name all your life, anyway.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
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Summary and Title are highly misleading (Score:5, Informative)
They gladly gave him DSL. What they didn't do was allow a username/email address with 'shit' in it and he insisted since that was part of his name. I'm glad he got his way in the end, but he wasn't being denied the service itself.
Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
But "Shit" is not normally considered to be a rude word.
I can understand if the name was Cuntington but "shit" is an everyday word (So is "cunt" where I live) and part of someone's name.
I've never understood the whole profanity thing, why would someone want to be offended by a word, you would think people would have better things to do than create reasons to be offended.
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Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading (Score:5, Funny)
My friend mister Koksukhar had no such problems
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Clbuttic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in Southern New Zealand, where the word "cunt" certainly wouldn't be used in "polite society", but is (or maybe was) very common amongst teenagers and people in their 20s.
Pretty much to the point where we didn't really consider it a "bad word". Someone beats you in a game on the console du jour, then acts all smug about it, you'd call them a "smarmy cunt". Or you greet a friend you haven't seen in a while with, "Good to see ya you old cunt, how's things?". Or even referring to a third person as a "good cunt" if you think they're someone very reliable and friendly. And so on ad nauseum. It's just a word...
(also, it's more common to use it for males rather than females, whereas in places where it's exclusively a "harsh insult", it tends to be used for females only)
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Tell me about it (Score:5, Funny)
I can't even get dial up and had to wait until my neighbors had wireless to steal it.
-- John Fuckinson
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
Are you serious? Why in the hell should he have to -- IT'S HIS NAME. It's on his birth certificate, his Social Security card, his drivers license. It's probably in the phone book, and on every check he's ever written. And now he can't use his OWN LEGAL NAME that he has had since birth for his e-mail address because it "contains an expletive?" It's not even like he's some anarchistic goofball who somehow managed to legally change his surname to "Shit" in an attempt to be cute or radical -- it's his family name, borne by his ancestors, and it just happens to contain that four-letter sequence in the middle of the name. And, what, he can't use it because somewhere, somehow there might be some handful of insanely moralistic wackos who would be offended by it?
I'm sorry, but this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in my life. And, given what I've witnessed in my half century on this planet, that's really saying something.
What's in a name? (Score:4, Funny)
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
- Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Of course that quote would have serious humour ramifications with a name like "Libshitz". Shakespeare was however cognizant of the political ramification of mere words and, alas, names. My theory that bad and stupid people primarily get into management positions has once again proven to be correct.
Ouch! (Score:5, Informative)
The "National Enquirer" is a notorious scandal sheet.
The "Philadelphia Inquirer" is a respectable daily newspaper.
I just felt the need to point that out.
Headline/summary/article mismatch (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointing out the obvious:
The headline and summary aren't really accurate to the linked article.
Has anyone considered the impact this sort of thing has on Slashdot's credibility?
Maybe I'm looking at it through rose colored glasses, but I used to like reading through all the summaries and linked articles on Slashdot. Now it seems like in the last 8-12 months, more and more headlines and their accompanying sumamries are deliberately misleading and inflammatory. I skim the RSS headlines and have found myself assuming that any headline that says "Microsft does X", "Comcast now doing Y", "Verizon did Z" etc. is probably off the mark and just nother boy crying wolf. It seems that I'm right about hald the time; which is about 45% more then I should be.
Most of these "inaccuracies" seem to pander to various anti-insert-company-here sentiments - ie., Verizon has been shown to have done a bunch of shady shit regarding spying or Comcast with it's throttling/filtering/P2P blocking or whatever, so now they do something stupid and it gets twisted into something much larger and more sinister.
Yes, Verizon is moronic for not allowing customer serivce people a little latitude or for having simplistic filtering, but nowhere did I read they denied DSL. They did deny an email address though. Verizon should also probably work on dealing with people-telling someone to misspell their name in order to avoid some stupid email address name filter misses the point. BUT, everything I read suggests that he would have been ok with an email address like DrHermanIL@XXX; not that he should he have to do that though.
If Slashdot's motto was something like "It's not news, it's Slashdot", I'd make a little one line post about how the headline and linked article disagree. But with a motto of "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters", I'd expect accuracy and a little less hysteria and/or pandering.
I had a company website blocked for the same thing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I had a company website blocked for the same th (Score:5, Funny)
I can only guess what the owners of Pen Island [penisland.net] especially if they need a therapist [therapistfinder.com]
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Also Experts-Exchange.com (Score:5, Funny)
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You Americans and your "morals" (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a personal story about profanity and a content company... My user name for my cable account is an expletive describing my feelings about the cable company. What's interesting though, is that apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way about the company, since 'fuckyourogers' has been taken and I've had to add numbers on the end of it.
What's even MORE interesting though have been my attempts to get technical support on my account. But during my somewhat angry registration process I didn't hit any snags where the cable company thought my username was inappropriate.
Funny how life works...
'Swearwords' outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:'Swearwords' outdated (Score:5, Informative)
It's because words such as this are derived from a 'lower' dialect of English than the English which was spoken by the nobility when the French took over England. A lot of the words we consider swear words today are words derived from the language of the peasants that no noble would be caught dead saying.
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Re:'Swearwords' outdated (Score:5, Interesting)
I also find it interesting how the word 'nigger' has actually become more taboo than it was 20 or so years ago (unless you actually happen to have black skin, then you can say it all you like). Watching some old episodes of The Goodies they made reference to black South African persons as 'Nig-nogs'. They'd never get away with that these days, despite the fact that the whole episode was poking fun at the whole idea of apartheid(sp?) anyway.
Also, does anyone remember reading a book called 'The Faraway Tree' by Enid Blyton? One of the characters had the name Fanny. Recent editions of the book have had her name changed to Franny.
Funny old world isn't it?
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This reminds me of Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
Are we REALLY that stupid? Apparently so!
In Japan, it's nearly impossible to order something from a restaurant if it isn't on the menu. (I say nearly, because I haven't been to every restaurant in Japan, so this only applies to EVERY SINGLE restaurant I've been to in Japan) IF, on the menu is a ham sandwich and a cheese sandwich, and you try to order a ham and cheese sandwich, they will look at you funny and/or tell you that it is not available to order this item. This example, of course is fictitious, but a real life example was at an "italian" restaurant I went to in Japan. (Most of them are pretty good, but this one was not!) I wanted spaghetti with italian sausage. Not on the menu. So I ordered spaghetti with sauce and the sausage as two items that WERE on the menu. I thought I had successfully solved the problem. Nope! Failure: The two orders came out SEPARATELY at COMPLETELY different times. It was considered an appetizer and came out first... people started eating from it and was gone before my spaghetti with sauce arrived. I didn't know how to say anything but "Dame!" which would have been very rude so I said nothing. I was defeated.
And every time I see human minds get trumped by a script or something in software, I get offended. Perhaps it's odd that I, as a "technology professional" would be offended by technology, but I am. But then again, I would consider this to be a clear misapplication of technology and I find that equally offensive. To this day, I prefer going through a checkout line run by humans rather than the 'self checkout' lines where you scan and pay for your stuff by yourself. Humans are still better than machines... for now... and only when humans aren't acting like machines.
Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on. Don't defend these losers. He asked for an email address based on his name, just like millions of other customers.
It's a perfectly reasonable request, which Verizon denied solely because some arbitrary filter detected a naughty word buried in the address, a word that would only be noticed by someone with a juvenile mindset. The filter is obviously intended to screen out truly nasty phrases, like "verizonisfullofshit@verizon.com", but like most such filters it is crude and inflexible, and unsuited for its purpose.
And to make things worse, no one at Verizon had the authority or inclination to override this zero tolerance policy for the substring "shit". The only choice they gave him, if he wanted DSL, was to select an email address that was not based on his name. Naturally he refused, as would anyone with an ounce of pride in his family name.
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Funny)
FFS stop posting my e-mail address on the Internet. Now I'm going to get spammed.
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having worked for Verizon, and directly supported the system responsible for this bullshit, I can confirm the idiocy in the story. It is physically impossible to get anything done through customer service, the development teams run by Verizon IT are made of failure and shame, and they really do reboot every system at midnight so that it passes Sheygan Kheradpir's (the IT company's president) 1am "system check," where he logs in to everything personally to make sure it's working.
It is a culture of scapegoatism and "we made the date" development, with zero regard for code quality or robustness, or even "does it work?" Ever pay your bill online? Ever wonder why there's now only a single path through the website that will actually get it paid? This is why. Anecdote: The support team on which I worked hired a Java programmer to assist with the forensic troubleshooting of the "netservices.verizon.net" site, since development never delivered the documentation of the site's design and function (I am certain it didn't exist), and after he solved two major problems by inverting two lines and reducing a 200 line module to 11 lines, he was locked out of the CVS repository, presumably to keep him from making the IT developers look bad.
They are colossal failures inside Verizon, and the company as a whole has been working to drive out every last bit of talent since Chuck Lee sold GTE to Bell Atlantic. The executives are completely disconnected from every aspect of production. Anecdote: the group president was down for a "meet the troops" day, and had been touring the Verizon Online NOC when she had to get on a conference call. Her assistant sat down at one of the work stations (visualize a NASA Mission Control-type layout) and used one of the duty phones to dial in. She then handed the phone to the local executive (which is fine, that's her job). The exec attended the call, and when she was done, rather than simply hang up the phone (which was literally within arms reach), the executive handed the phone back to ther assistant!
The bureaucratic structure is openly worshiped by every member of management (ask me how I know) regardless of the detriment to the business.It was absolutely unreal. Manipulation of performance statistics is commonplace. There is zero management accountability in any department. Check out some of the deeper pages in the "pay my bill online" section of the web site. The "Help and Support" section pages generate 404 errors. There is no way to actually order service over the phone, so if you don't already have some kind of internet service, you can't order anything from Verizon.
The only thing keeping these guys afloat is the fact that the FiOS product genuinely slays every competing technology available, and they know it.
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Funny)
Cultural habit, sorry:) Otherwise, I really don't give a shit.
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Informative)
If I moved to Israel I would hate to be told that "Michael Smith" sounds like a rude word in the local language and I couldn't use my normal email address.
What does Michael Smith sound like in Hebrew? I cannot think of a single dirty Hebrew phrase that sounds like Michael Smith, especially since Michael is a Hebrew name ("Mi CaEl"- "Who is like God?" in Hebrew).
Jewish people here occasionally have a chuckle at the name of our Friends Of The Zoos [fotz.org.au] society.
Potz is more of a Yiddish term than Hebrew, though I do believe that most American Jews are of Yiddish-language decent. In any case, nice one! The Kia car company is another funny one in Hebrew, the name means "vomit".
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They were also giving the reason that he couldn't have an e-mail address with his name in it was because it was offensive. That's not a valid reason to decline an e-mail address based off a person's name and he was quite reasonably offended by that. It's unreasonable to ban an e-mail address based off the clients name merely because you find a few select letters in his name fit a banned word. I know that, you know that, he knew that and now Verizon realizes their mistake.
You can be cut and dry about what went on, but seriously, life shouldn't be that way. If we all looked at and dealt with each other on that level, I think it would be time for me to find another country to live in.
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Re:This has nothing to do with his name.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually tend to use this angle when it actually applies. If he had already paid for service, they were being scum by denying him a legitimate email and violating THEIR contract. I have a feeling that being Jewish, this fellow would have been educated on the issues of contracts (the Torah seems to be quite specific that contracts are the way things are done, between humans and between them and their god(s), devils, etc). I'm fairly sure it wasn't just dragging them through the mud that did the trick. However, the Constitution has no provisions for "large corporations violating contracts into which they entered voluntarily wanting someone's money but failing in the providing of full service as paid for"... stuff like that. Laws and rules about that precede most national governments, and tend to be grandfathered in, since they work.
This is just your typical bureaucratic monkeys being bureaucratic monkeys, that usually get attracted to bureaucratic jobs (management, government, etc...) and doing exactly what and WHY they are hired. Being bureaucratic monkeys, with just enough firing neurons to be annoying bureaucratic monkeys, but not enough to actually be reasonable men... this is usually why you hear of bureaucratic monkeys, or monkeys obedient to bureaucrats tazering paralized kids 19 times or shooting old ladies full of juice even though they're wheelchair bound. Bureaucratic monkeys are examples of scumbags that would've been aborted (post natal if need be) by any self respecting parent, long before they got to breed more bureaucratic monkeys... until they bred and over bred to the situation we have today.
Again, the Constitution of the USA or for the USA (depending on which one you take an oath to when you get sworn in to your bureaucratic job) has nothing on this issue... this is purely a contract law issue, and that precedes the Constitution by several centuries at the least.
Also, his name containing an expletive can easily be explained as NON expletive, and can be interpreted as such by any lawyer or judge with enough functional brain matter. Why, you ask? Simple. Cultural difference. If a man who is a DOCTOR can carry that name and not change it, you can be fairly sure he has traded on it.
That being said i've seen some screwy names in the past, so while I want to believe this article is bogus, I am unsurprised if it is true. Bureaucratic monkeys make every part of the world miserable, where the locals allow them to infest. Voting has never been a cure. It wasn't when they did it in the name of the king, or the oligarch, or the tyrant (in the greek meaning of word) or the dictator or "the people's party" or any other reason for which bureaucratic monkeys perform their unquestioning duties. People to whom "duty" is a primary prerogative, should concern you, worry you, and scare you. These are the monkeys who shot kids in the back of the head for merely not complying with the new "party" or for their parents being rich (see Che and Cuba literature on this issue). Sure, here they're obeying a different "letter of the law", but its all the same. Monkey see, monkey do. We don't need "less abortions", we need a lot more. They should be looking for bureaucratic monkey genes, but who would be doing the legislating but other bureaucratic monkeys... the sense of survival is strong in the bureaucratic monkeys.
MUD: Thou canst not put this genie back into the bottle. The genie reads a scroll of rules and regulations. Thou art Screwed... royally, and without vaseline.
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Re:Obviously.. (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing he didn't live in Dildo, Newfoundland Dildo, Newfoundland [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Obviously.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obviously.. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't live all that far from Fucking. It's a tiny, tiny village and they can not afford to replace the signs that get stolen... mostly by tourists from the UK.
So when you go to fucking, please just the pictures of the Fucking Signs and do not steal the fucking signs.
Really.
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Re:Obviously.. (Score:5, Funny)
And what you're asking is, then, for the Fucking tourists to keep their Fucking hands off the Fucking signs? Sounds Fucking good to me.
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Re:Obviously.. (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing he didn't live here [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Sorry to say: typical American (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep the people focused on the trivial and they won't notice the important stuff.
It works so well we don't realize that it's being done a lot of the time. And it's not just the US - here in the UK it's just as bad if not worse.
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