u/AnhedoniaLogomachy

“Thank you for being a loyal customer for over 29 years.”

That’s what I read each time I open the Verizon app, and it’s beginning to irk me!

I have been a Verizon customer for close to 30 years. I have lived in my house for 20 years. Verizon has been reliable during those years, until about a month ago.

At home, and only at home, service is inconsistent: calls drop, don’t connect or callers can’t hear me or I can’t hear them. I noticed that I only have one or two bars when I’m home.

So, I did a little reading and tried switching to airplane mode and back, nothing. I turned the phone off and back on, no improvement. I reset the phone network, that didn’t fix it. I even switched the phone to WiFi calling, to no avail!

I called and I got some guy from only God knows where asking me a list of idiotic questions until I totally lost my cool and finally asked him, can you help me or not?! He claimed that there was a service disruption in my area but they had fixed it. I knew that was B.S.

I called again yesterday but didn’t have the patience to get past the AI voice.

I called again today and after getting past the AI “ASSistant” I immediately told the rep what I had already done, that I have called and all for nothing. She claimed to check my device and that she was able to see that I have been having trouble. She said she would get me a signal booster, that it should help.

I’m willing to try it, but my family in California had similar issues, the booster was no help, and they ended up leaving Verizon.

I’m so very disappointed that after decades of exemplary service, Verizon has declined. What would cause loss of signal strength? Google says that 5G is known for limited coverage, signal interference and network congestion, slow data, draining battery, dropped calls, weak indoor reception.

I’ve read the canon several times over the years. Today, I lost electricity at home due to a thunderstorm so I pulled out the old canon, falling apart from decades of use, and began reading A Study in Scarlet out loud to keep me busy, but mostly to calm my nervous pup.

When I got to the part where Holmes and Watson disclose each others’ “shortcomings” and Watson says, “I keep a bull pup,” I was surprised!

I came here to look at other mentions of Watson’s “bull pup” and found only one prior discussion from three years ago with comments turned off.

That three year old discussion was interesting. A poster pointed out that “bull pup” may refer to a bad temper. That makes the most sense to me because to my (feeble) recollection, the only other dogs mentioned are Mrs. Hudson’s ailing dog and Toby the mongrel. Although, I never thought of Watson as ill tempered.

Another posted said that it probably was a dog but questioned why he called it a “pup”. As a long time dog owner, I can verify that I call all my dogs pups, even as seniors.

Google says that it refers to a revolver or an actual dog, but not to a bad temper.