Journal of PlanetMike

Many moons ago I had a subscription to MacWorld through Zinio. Zinio is a service that gives you an electronic version of a magazine, and the subscription I got was free with some Mac purchase I made in August 2004. It actually wasn’t that bad a product, but the funky player was a hassle. I stopped the subscription in August 2005. Since then I’ve gotten two messages about the Zinio player and conflicts with various Apple QuickTime updates, which were fine.

Tonight I got an offer from Zinio for several magazines, two of which I’ve never heard of before. The email message was notCAN-SPAM compliant, they did not include their postal mailing address in the message. It also said this at the bottom of the message:

You are receiving this email at (my address), because you have opted in to receive promotions and updates from Zinio. Update your email preferences.

The “Update your email preferences” was a link to the Zinio web site. I logged into my account, and discovered I already had opted out of Zinio’s marketing drivel (click to enlarge):

I’ve emailed Zinio at their customer support address, pointing them to this page. I doubt they’ll respond. But the helpful hint would be if you have any investments in Zinio, you should get out now; they’re getting desperate for customers; so desperate that they are breaking the law to sell product. I won’t be surprised if they get sold or go bankrupt sometime soon. And if you are a current Zinio customer, you may want to cancel your subscription now so you can get a refund for issues you haven’t received yet.

Around two to three years ago, I signed up to get DSL from Verizon with a guaranteed price so I wouldn’t have to worry about future price increases. A few months ago, Verizon “discontinued” my DSL package, so my price increased. Their fine print allowed them to change packages, which cancelled my guaranteed price. So I checked the Verizon web site yesterday, and saw they had a new bundle price for my phone service with DSL for around $20 less than my current increased price (about $10 less than my earlier price as well). So I called Verizon, waited on hold for around 15 minutes, and got a nice customer service guy (Mr. Hutchins maybe?). He took my information, put me on hold, and after a few minutes came back on and said it was all switched up, I should get my new price on my next bill. I also was told nothing else would be changing, so I wouldn’t have to worry about my DSL service going down or anything. Fine. Losing DSL would be a major problem, as a full-time blogger, I work at home and live online.

So the first thing is Verizon should have given the less expensive bundle price without me having to ask. That’s called good customer service.

But today! I got a phone call from DirecTV to confirm my DirecTV service. WTF? I’m on the phone with them now (still!) Verizon gave my information to DirecTV. After two customer service reps, (Heidi was nice) supposedly my DirecTV order (for two receivers, dvr, and the NFL package) has been cancelled. I asked if I would be getting any junk mail or telemarketing from DirecTV, Heidi said no, I shouldn’t.

So now I’m on hold with Verizon. They are bumping me up to a supervisor. Ms. Robinson will investigate, but basically, I should have my Double Play package. So hopefully I won’t have to worry about a price increase until next summer when Verizon screws around with their customers again.

So after 35 minutes of wasting my time, all I get out of this is an assurance that my next bill will be ok. I loathe Verizon. If there were any kind of competition in the home connectivity market, I would be out of Verizon so quickly their heads would be spinning.