When it comes to technology, I am more old school than Alexander Graham Bell. I recently purchased my first iPhone at the Verizon store in Chestnut Hill. My next-door neighbor and I spent about three hours there. I had lots of questions for the saleslady about the phone, of course. She pointed out that the store is only for sales and that one would have to call Verizon for questions about service.

However, I persisted with questions, and the young saleslady was tolerant, but she might as well have been speaking Polish. (I thought that maybe she was.) I know it was not her fault. It was like a college professor trying to teach calculus to a 6-year-old who hasn’t yet learned how to add and subtract.

When I see other people doing all sorts of things with their cellphones, everything but juggle swords and create full-course dinners, their fingers speeding across the numbers like a world-class violinist, I am mystified. I am perfectly satisfied being able to make and receive calls. And I may be the only person in the city who deliberately never takes his phone with him when he leaves the house.

Isn’t that the whole point of this devilish device, to be able to annoy other people in the post office, the bank, supermarket, restaurant, and to have your head in the phone while walking across the street, even against a red light? I do not want to be one of those annoying people, so I leave the addictive little Lucifer at home. Before cellphones, somehow people managed to get messages on their landline phones when they got home and return the calls. It is not impossible to do the same thing today.

When I was young, Bell Telephone had a monopoly on phone service. If you had a problem, you dialed “O” and immediately spoke to an actual woman who was very pleasant. She could usually solve your problem, but if she could not, Bell Telephone dispatched a technician to your house the next day who fixed it. And you were NOT CHARGED for the fixing.

But in 1984, the federal government in its infinite wisdom allegedly did us a big service and broke up the Bell Telephone monopoly. Is there anyone alive in the United States today who thinks we are better off with the plethora of phone service providers?

After Bell broke up, my wife and I had Verizon for many years, eventually for TV and internet as well as landline phones. I would say that on average, we had to contact Verizon once or twice a year because emails suddenly stopped coming, the TV set stopped working, something went wrong with the phones, etc. We would reluctantly call Verizon and normally spend at least an hour on the phone, maybe much longer, mostly on hold. Sometimes they could fix the problem from their cubicles, and if not, they would send a technician for an in-home visit. I must say the people on the phone and the technicians were always unfailingly polite, and the problem was almost always eventually solved.

However, in January of this year, we moved from a house in West Mt. Airy to an apartment in Chestnut Hill. I called Verizon and asked them to switch our coverage to the new address. The Verizon representative said they could provide phone coverage but they did not offer internet service to our apartment complex.

I could not believe this; after all, we do not live in the middle of Montana or at the North Pole. We live in Chestnut Hill. I naturally assumed, as I bet everyone reading this does, that Verizon covered every part of Philadelphia. Since I thought the woman on the phone must have been mistaken, the next day I called Verizon again and spoke to a different representative, who told me the same thing. “I’m so sorry, but you will have to get another provider for TV and internet,” she said.

So I reluctantly called Comcast. I looked online for customer comments about Comcast (Xfinity) service. Some people wrote that Comcast service was terrible while about an equal number praised them. When I called Comcast, I wound up on the phone with a delightful lady in New York for about two hours and signed up for Comcast internet and TV service for about $300 monthly while we paid about $100 a month to Verizon for TV.

For two months everything was fine. Then, suddenly, there was no picture on the TV set, just a big “No Signal” sign on the screen. I pulled the plug and put it back in but still no picture. Reluctantly, I went on the Comcast website looking for service, and wound up communicating with a chatbot that asked numerous questions, which I answered. Still no picture. Then it asked me for my credit card number, stating that I would be charged $5, which would be refunded, and a real technician would call me. (One month later, when I received my credit card statement, the charge from 1C3Ask An Expert Online was $65, not $5.)

My phone call with the technician lasted an hour with lots of questions and answers. Still no picture. The technician then said the problem could probably be fixed internally and that I would get a call in an hour asking if our TV picture was back on. We never did get the phone call, and the picture did not come back on, so I started the whole process again. Again came the chatbot and then on the phone with someone whose photo popped up on the screen, underneath which were the words “19,965 satisfied customers.” After one more hour on the phone, he said I would be getting a call with the name and number of a technician with whom I could set up a home appointment.

I never did get that call after wasting an entire afternoon. There was no way I was going to do a frustrating repeat performance the following day, so I called Tim Tirendi, a former production manager for the Chestnut Hill Local who now owns and operates iHelp, a North Wales-based company that fixes computers. Tim came to our residence the next morning, pushed some buttons on the TV clicker, and within five minutes the TV picture came back on. It has worked perfectly ever since.

So if you have a similar horrendously frustrating and nerve-wracking experience with Comcast or any other TV, internet or phone provider, there is a solution available. Good luck!

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.