IN the middle of all this...

I mentioned my Blackberry died. The device's charging port stopped connecting.

I spent at least four of the last 12 hours on the telephone with Verizon support or trying to find them. I finally got an international telephone number and got support. All the awful things you are imaging happened. I finally said forward my calls to this prepaid I bought and for which I am paying a fortune every minute. I asked for a supervisor to call me.

Got a call back a bit ago from a manager. Went through the whole thing she said they can't do anything other than tell me to activate my insurance under Assurion. She acknowledged Assurion does not ship outside the US or Canada.

I explained what I am doing and asked for some help. She told me it was my fault for leaving the US. I asked her if she thought what I was doing might justify a little international travel. She again insisted that Verizon could not, by regulation, do anything for me.

That made me angry. I asked for the regulation and she could not cite such. I asked if she meant a corporate policy and she said the two words meant the same thing.

I asked, as a personal favor so that I could get back to this work I am doing, for someone to help me out by going to a FedEx office with an activated Blackberry 8830 world phone with my encoding and ship it to me via Fed Ex to Jet Blue's Santo Domingo office. She said corporate policy (quick learner this manager) prevented anyone in the company from doing any such thing.