End Cable Monopoly

Comments

1. Bud Dirkle says

   August 30, 2012 at 12:02 am

   I live in New York state and have a phone, internet, and cable television package from Time Warner Cable. Their service is atrocious! I recently went without being able to receive incoming calls for four days and if I had not realized it was to peaceful in my house would still be without it. But I called them for help, and they were going to send someone to look at it in two weeks. I spent three hours with them on the phone and several times asked to speak to a customer service supervisor. They kept trying to bribe me off of that course of action by moving up the maintenance by one day. Finally when I wouldn’t be swayed they transfered my call to another number where I was informed they were busy with other calls – I waited an additional 15 minutes and then I called back and waited for another ten minutes when I was able to speak to a person again – I admit I yelled at them – I told them that I do not work for them, that they work for me. I was not going to get up and reset my router, I was not going to get out my laptop and plug it directly into the modem, and I was not going to wait for another half hour on hold. So I gave them my number and told them to do whatever they needed to do to get it to a customer service supervisor, and have that customer service supervisor call me when he has time to talk. I also added that if I did not hear from them within 3 hours that I would take it as a sign they did not value my 8 year patronage of my service and would like to have me show up at their offices with their equipment and end the arrangement whereby I pay them for services that I only receive some of the time. I received a call back in an hour from a recorded message saying they had made some repairs in the area and that might have fixed the problem (the call back was on my cellphone, just to clear up any confusion about incoming calls being answered). They then wanted me to press 1 to keep my appointment two weeks away or 2 to cancel the appointment. I still have not talked to a supervisor as I the customer asked to do. I have had to call over 100 times in the past 5 years to get technical support because their service was not working. Every time the first thing they do is spend an hour of my time jumping through hoops for them. Realize when they say reset their router they can do it by issuing a command from their keyboard. It is not necessary for you the customer to get up and do it. They just want you to feel like it is your problem to fix and they are helping you fix the problem. etc. etc. etc. then after I jump through all the hoops they do some mysterious fix on their end and it fixes the problem. Except for the one time when the service guy actually showed up after a 8 day wait and found that in his words ” if you use connectors from two different metals then they will corrode and interfere with service about every six to nine months.” He had no idea why they did not use connectors made out of the same metals but finished with see you again in 9 months as he drove away into the sunset like he was doing me a favor in temporarily fixing a service that I do not temporarily pay for. So I am mad. Mad as hell! and I want the cable monopoly to end. I want choice and competition for my service and I want people who are not sitting at their terminals laughing at the absurd things they can make me do to re-establish my service that I pay for them to provide to me. This has to end. What cause can I join? Or do I need to start one? Thanks in advance to whomever cares, Bud