By Haddon Libby
I hate Time Warner Cable.
It is not for the loss of CBS and Showtime channels – I have been a DirecTV customer for 15 years.
And I have forgiven Time Warner Cable for years of home internet service that would go out randomly in the evening and not restart until the morning when someone at command central flipped a switch to restart internet to our neighborhood.
I hate Time Warner Cable for its ‘Business Class’ service. You see, I worked on getting phone and internet service set up correctly with Time Warner Cable since…are you ready…Thanksgiving 2012! Only on August 9th were things totally fixed.
Before I get to my story, you should know that Time Warner Cable made $7.65 billion in profits after tax last year while their CEO made $21 million before stock options and retirement benefits. This company is the classic example of a management team that makes 400 times its average employee.
Don’t feel bad for CBS as their CEO earned $75 million last year excluding stock options and retirement benefits while the company made $3.65 billion.
The fight with CBS is about greed on both sides. CBS wants $2/month for you to have their broadcast network service, a doubling of what they currently get.
And Time Warner Cable isn’t protecting you from high rates. If they were, they wouldn’t force you to take bundles of channels that you have no intention of ever watching. They wouldn’t try and force you to bundle phone, cable and internet to get a ‘good deal’.
This is all about greed with no concern for you, me or most of their rank and file employees.
Like a drug dealer, they feel that they have you. The average person watches 34 hours of television a week – 48 hours for seniors and half that for those under 18. The average person spent a similar amount of time on the internet. This is in part why their customer service is so bad and prices are so high. They have you.
My saga started with a sales rep and his inability to input a phone transfer order correctly. This mistake took four months to fix and only occurred after I contacted the President’s office in New York City.
Setting up voicemail took another eighteen weeks as no one at Time Warner Cable wanted to fix their mistakes…or return phone calls. It took a random person on one of my customer service calls to fax the instructions to their voicemail system from a one-page guide affixed to her cubicle wall. Wouldn’t you think the Time Warner’s installation team would give this to you as part of the set-up? They just hook things up, as I was told – the sales rep is supposed to do this.
Lastly, I had to get a static IP address for internet service. While the installers did their job, once again they had no information to guide me in setting up the system.
While the local customer service number and Live Chat function were disconnected, I eventually found a rep in Texas who advised me to “go to my ‘IT department.” When I informed her that I didn’t have one – I was told that Time Warner Cable “just turns it on.”
For $95, I found a business that came out and fixed things in five minutes. A simple one page set of instructions on how to connect to a static IP number would have fixed things – something Time Warner Cable would not provide.
Worth noting, they will not refund anything for the months of wrong service and aggravation – no one is authorized to do that.
Time Warner Cable is a sales organization that does not care about you or me.
