Companies I HATE #1 -- Cox Communications

Okay, so I think rather than just be frustrated, I'm going to start informing everyone about "Companies I HATE." Installment #1 will deal with Cox Communications.

I hate Cox Communications.

When we moved to Louisiana (the apt. in Gonzales), they sent someone to do an install who spoke marginal English, stepped through the ceiling in our bathroom, and left the house without mentioning the damage. (He thought we wouldn't NOTICE? I mean, I had his name RIGHT THERE on the installation sheet.) So I called Cox and notified them of the damage. They said they would have someone out on a certain day. No show. Landlord got involved and FINALLY got two illiterate hobunks with maybe seven teethe between them the come push the broken drywall back into the ceiling and spray acoustic ceiling covering over it.

Needless to say, it wasn't sucessful. But then we were concerned with wiring problems. It took three sets of people from Cox to come do a SIMPLE wall fish and drop a line. THEN someone moved into the apartment next to ours. He got cable, which meant he was FORCED into the government-sanctioned monopoly of choosing overpriced bad service, and Cox was back out to our apartments again. When the next sub-functional moron was "installing" the guy next door's cable, ours got cut off. We waited for it to come back on. And waited. And then, less then patient (imagine that) we go outside and tell the guy that by the time he leaves, our cable BETTER be back on. Finally, our cable comes back on. We were relieved. But then we had problems with our reception again so we had MORE cable guys come out.

When they were "fixing" it, they told us that Mr. Magoo who had installed guy next door's cable had actually CUT the wire to our apartment and had just patched us into the other guy's line. Yeah, we were stealing cable thanks to Cox's COMPLETE AND TOTAL INCOMPETENCE. Fortunately, the guys who figured that out recognized that we were not culpable and just fixed it.

Funny enough, a couple of weeks after the patched line debaucle, guy next door had a DirecTV satellite. That definetly got us thinking...but we knew we were moving soon, so we decided to grudgingly accept the crappy service from the hapless fools at Cox.

When we did move, we just did as we were conditioned to do and switched our service. But then we weren't getting all the channels we subscribed for. Turns out that the people who lived here before only had basic cable, so that was all they had turned on for us.

When I called to complain, I was hit with fee after fee for someone coming to our house to fix the problem. THE TRUTH IS, ALL THESE FEES ARE CRAP. Most of the time, they can just flip a switch, change a code in a computer, etc. Making us pay to "self-install"? TOTAL CRAP.

So we just told them to take their crappy service, their bumbling morons of "technicians," and their monopoly and shove it. Sort of...we cancelled all television services and signed up with

DirecTV

and we are very happy. GREAT customer service. Act like they CARE whether or not you stay with their service. Unfortunately, we had to make a deal with the devil. We wanted to get Vonage for our telephone service...but we needed a cable modem to do that.

So we pondered, distressed: Do we stay with cable modem from COX or do we go with the equally repulsive monopoly of Bell South? We decided to go with the cable modem and Vonage. So far, we had been happy with our decision -- just having the computer hook-up drastically reduced the amount of time I had to spend on brain-drain dealing with their minimum-IQ staff. (Why would you need customer service that is actually responsive if people HAVE to have your service because there is no other choice? You don't. So they don't.)

WELL, what prompted my diatribe today was this: We had recently put our old TV from college in Will's bedroom. We knew that with Cox, if you had the "limited basic" service, you got a discount on your cable modem. We didn't want to give Will a real hook-up with DirecTV, but we thought it would be nice if he could watch, say, PBS on the little TV. So I called Cox.

BIG MISTAKE.

I asked them to switch us to the limited basic + internet deal. Okay, so we would be paying an extra $4 or so a month. I thought...we'll try it for a month and see. Then the "customer (dis)service" rep came back on and said that the soonest they could "install" was next Thursday. The conversation that ensued:
ME: Wait. This is just limited basic. All you have to do is send the signal to our house. There's no box. There's no need to send anyone out here.
IDIOT: Yes, ma'am, we send technicians out on all installs.
ME: And there is a charge for this, I assume.
IDIOT: Yes, $32.99.

GET THAT? They wanted to charge me $32.99 to send some moron out to my house so he could look and say, "yup, you're all ready for service" and flip a switch or something. I was like, just forget it.

See? That's what I get for trying.

Moral of the Story: CABLE COMPANIES COMPLETELY SUCK, thanks to our government and Supreme Court who recently confirmed, basically, that no one could use the lines of any company without permission. Phone, Cable, etc. Sincerely, I am all for reasonable business protections. But the "logic" was that there would be little incentive to make the capital expenditures to lay new lines if anyone could use them. My thought? Why are we protecting cable companies ad nauseum but pharmaceutical companies, who spend billions of dollars on research and development and formulation of drugs that save peoples lives every day, have only a limited amount of time to hold a patent on these medicines? If that's the way we're going to be about that, it seems that cable and phone companies should be assured no greater protection. They are not saving lives. They are not changing the world for the better. But no one seems to complain that they have no choice in this matter. Why not?

Besides, it seems to me that there would be GREATER incentive to lay lines, etc., if one's market share were shrinking because of competition. I mean, what if there were only one clothing store...let's say The Gap is the only store that the American government will allow to sell clothing in Louisiana. If you want to shop at Talbots or J. Crew or any other store, you have to move to a different part of the country. And their clothes are crappy because you HAVE to buy them or else make your own, which isn't practical for a lot of people. And the reason they can do this is because the government says that The Gap would have no reason to build new stores or create new product lines if they weren't assured of profit.

Sounds totally stupid, doesn't it? Seems like you wouldn't get the clothes you want, you'd only get the clothes they want to sell at the prices they set.

But add in other stores, and you get greater variety of styles, prices, and quality. You get sales. You get innovation. You get service when you walk into a store and ask for help. Even though they have to compete...or is it BECAUSE they have to compete. (Let's all have a big "DUH" together, now.)

I think we should be throwing major fits over this to our legislators. WHICH brings me to my next rant, when my blood pressure is back down again...coming soon, I HATE VERIZON WIRELESS. Stay Tuned. They totally suck in a serious way, too!