My Love/Hate Relationship with Time Warner Cable

I know I typically use this forum as a way to communicate how my beautiful baby is (rolling over, smiling and laughing, stomach is much better, starting to get a daytime schedule, etc.), but if you will indulge me just this once, I would like to take you on a trip down memory lane of my love/hate relationship with Time Warner Cable (TWC). If you live in town, you have likely heard me talk about my 3 1/2 year plight to get my cable fixed. Ladies and gentlemen, drum roll please...I think our cable woes are over.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start (oh, me and my Sound of Music passions.) About 3 1/2 years ago when we moved into our house, our cable issues began. At that time I called and talked to about 20 people on the phone and we had about 10 tech guys out to work on our issues. Our cable problems are intermittent, which I am now told is harder to detect (tell me something I don't know!). Have you ever called TWC and spoken to someone? You have a 1 in 3 chance of getting an American. Your other choices are someone from India or someone from Costa Rica. I should know, I practically have to send holiday cards to some of these people.  Finding a manager among the millions of call center answerers presents a whole extra set of problems.  When I finally did weasel my way into speaking to a manager in India named "David", I was hung up on! And that was after I spent an hour on hold to speak to someone.  (I am leaving out about a year worth of details for the sake of time, but realize this was not a one or two phone call issue.

Anyways, time went on and our issues were intermitent enough that I wasn't calling all day, every day. It wasn't that nothing was wrong, mind you, it was just that I didn't have time to deal with waiting on hold, talking to someone for an hour, being home all day to wait for a person who may, or may not show up, and having the problem still in effect.

Fast forward to me, 9 months pregnant...that was when everything came to a head! I was moody to say the least, laying on my back in the middle of summer in my bed and all I wanted to do was watch my 90210 in peace and check my email 800 times a day. Our picture would freeze up constantly. I have entire DVRed episodes of shows that are frozen. It was infuriating. I started to get a series of people (some shadier than others) coming to the house to fix our cable, but to no avail. They all said that the problem was at the poll and a maintenance person needed to come out. I am home all day...he wasn't here. I had Madeline and time passed because I was too tired to keep up the fight.

Once she started sleeping through the night and I was watching more TV, the problem got worse and worse. I was given the name of a manager. He gave me an extention to call, but you still have to wait on hold until someone would give you a chance to tell them the extention. There is a philosophy of TWC employees, I'm told, that if you cannot handle a call and you pass it along to a manager, you are seen as not doing a good job. "Get them off the phone!" is the motto. So, when I talked to Emily at the Cleveland Call Center and asked for the manager by name and extention, she told me she couldn't connect me because they had just changed all the extentions to 5 digit instead of four digit numbers. When I finally talked to the manager (3 calls later, mind you,) he said this was untrue. Imagine that! I asked him for his manager's name. Can you believe he refused to tell me? Unbelievable!

Anyways, he connected me to Leon. Leon is a lead field tech in charge of my area. He has been a dream come true. Leon gave me his home cell phone number. He came out immediately and realized the problem was at the tap. I told him I knew that, and we were supposed to have someone come out 4 times in 3 weeks. When he looked into it, it turned out that Larry, the maintenance tech, had been assigned our problem all 4 times, and decided it was too much of a hassle to fix, so he said the job was done. Uh uh, not done. I then spoke to Kirk, the maintenance boss for the Cleveland area. In fact, after Leon was here, I was in a conference call with Leon, Kirk, and Jack, the one of the head honchos of TWC for the entire Cleveland Area.

That brings us to today. We have finally settled our issues with TWC. And like my recounting of the bad, I must also say, they have done right by me. They gave us 4 months free of everything plus we now pay the same price as before, but have the added bonus of digital phone and turbo internet. In fact, the pictures above show the 5-man crew (including Leon) who came out to install it. They were here from 10:00am until after 1pm! When you get as high as Jack, you better believe you are going to have your cable fixed right!

And so, the moral of the story is...it's all who you know!