A Charter Analogy and Comment
OK, analogy:
If I call my mechanic and complain to her/him that every night when I drive home during rush hour it takes me twice as long to get home, and further bemoan the fact that if there's ever an accident in front of me, traffic around me comes to a standstill, s/he is not going to respond with, "Do you drive a car or a truck? (car) Could you please turn your car off and back on again? (done) Since the problem persists, we'll need to send someone out to take a look at your car." No, of course they wouldn't say that. Yet, every time I call with problems with my high-speed Internet service, my poorly-trained Charter monkey from the country du jour does just that, once they've exhausted all possible troubleshooting techniques from their monkey's flowchart. (Most of which I've already done myself either before calling or while on hold with them anyway.) So my point is that this happened again around a week or so ago. I was unable to acquire an IP address from the Charter DHCP servers. Everything was working on my end, with my wireless router, my PCs, etc., but my cable modem just wouldn't get an IP address. So, after 45 minutes plus on the phone, the thickly accented monkey "checked" my network and informed me that my modem appeared to be receiving a "weak" signal and that she would dispatch someone to my house the next Monday, (today). "Fine," I said, (even though I hate the idea of still more monkeys that drive trucks coming to my house). Well, of course, the very next morning, my Internet was working just fine again, but I thought I'd leave the service call in place and see how things were the rest of the week. The result? It's been as good as Charter service ever is, (and all that that implies), so I called early this AM, (around 2:00), to cancel while watching "Scary Movie 3" on TV. the recorded message told me that they were experiencing "unusually high call volume" and my wait time could be 15 minutes. So I just left the phone sit loosely by my ear while watching my show. I wound up falling asleep. When I awoke some time later, I checked the phone, which was still playing the Charter muzak, and discovered that I had now been on hold for an hour and a half!
Real nice company...
If I call my mechanic and complain to her/him that every night when I drive home during rush hour it takes me twice as long to get home, and further bemoan the fact that if there's ever an accident in front of me, traffic around me comes to a standstill, s/he is not going to respond with, "Do you drive a car or a truck? (car) Could you please turn your car off and back on again? (done) Since the problem persists, we'll need to send someone out to take a look at your car." No, of course they wouldn't say that. Yet, every time I call with problems with my high-speed Internet service, my poorly-trained Charter monkey from the country du jour does just that, once they've exhausted all possible troubleshooting techniques from their monkey's flowchart. (Most of which I've already done myself either before calling or while on hold with them anyway.) So my point is that this happened again around a week or so ago. I was unable to acquire an IP address from the Charter DHCP servers. Everything was working on my end, with my wireless router, my PCs, etc., but my cable modem just wouldn't get an IP address. So, after 45 minutes plus on the phone, the thickly accented monkey "checked" my network and informed me that my modem appeared to be receiving a "weak" signal and that she would dispatch someone to my house the next Monday, (today). "Fine," I said, (even though I hate the idea of still more monkeys that drive trucks coming to my house). Well, of course, the very next morning, my Internet was working just fine again, but I thought I'd leave the service call in place and see how things were the rest of the week. The result? It's been as good as Charter service ever is, (and all that that implies), so I called early this AM, (around 2:00), to cancel while watching "Scary Movie 3" on TV. the recorded message told me that they were experiencing "unusually high call volume" and my wait time could be 15 minutes. So I just left the phone sit loosely by my ear while watching my show. I wound up falling asleep. When I awoke some time later, I checked the phone, which was still playing the Charter muzak, and discovered that I had now been on hold for an hour and a half!
Real nice company...
1 Comments:
It's generally been in the 70's but we've had a couple days in the 90's.
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