Tag Archives: technician

Time Warner Cable — Where do I start?

  By Big Dan | September 3, 2011 - 1:24 am | ,
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As a Time Warner cable customer for many years I wonder where to start. Do I start with your internet service is generally awesome and trouble free? Do I tell you that your home phone service has been trouble free since it was installed two weeks ago?

All this is true but your video service absolutely SUCKS since the move to all digital!

  • It’s so bad that my family would rather use the TV’s tuner than your clunky set top boxes.
  • My bedroom is the only remaining cable box which happens to be a DVR.
  • The aforementioned  DVR’s software is so slow, clunky, and unresponsive to remote control input that I often wonder if I hit the button hard enough.
  • I’ve had a new drop run from the pole directly to my apartment subverting the building’s existing wiring.
  • I’ve changed more cable boxes than I care to remember mostly at my expense traveling 45 minutes each way to your closest office.
  • A previous  technician put some sort of locking head on the leads to my spitters. For what reason, I don’t know, but I do know that 1 of them is a splitter I bought and paid for. You have no right to do that. Especially to a customer who forks over his hard earned money for crappy hardware and what’s turned out to be crappy service.

The regular technician to my area who happens to be a helluva a guy fixes an issue and jokingly says I’ll see you in a couple months. The sad part is he’s right.

You swap out my DVR with a new one to ‘repair’ a pixilation issue. In turn your wiping out all my recordings, saved series, etc only to have the tech find out it’s a wiring issue, replace the wire, but cannot give my back the DVR he just pulled out because he’s already deactivated it. To add insult it injury a week later the new DVR is pixalating and stuttering on the same channels all over again. Restarting the cycle of waiting two weeks for a tech to swap it out all over agian.

You charge me, a loyal customer who forks over his money month after month $55 to install home phone service which is already priced ridiculously high compared to other VIOP options yet waive that charge for a new customer.

You refuse to credit me for a set top box that froze up and was sitting on my table unused for 3 months because “the equipment was still on your premisses”. The thing is you and I both know you can look in your logs and see when that MAC address was last active on your network.

You won’t even credit me for the $30 I paid to you for a useless set tup box. Should I send you the bill for the gas burned to return those boxes? The funny thing is yous will send a tech out to replace a box but not to pick one  up. How self-serving your company policies are.

The sad thing is this note isn’t even written by a TV addict. I’m a guy who has a DVR only because I cannot stand commercials. You know what I cannot stand more? A company the values a new customer over a loyal customer. A company that has it’s hand in so many pots that it’s primary service SUCKS the big one and it doesn’t even care.

This Week In Dan

  By Big Dan | March 12, 2011 - 1:48 pm |
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This week has been pretty good. Spring is the in air and it cannot come fast enough. This winter was one of the worst I can remember.  I’m getting out to exercise more and more with the nice weather.

I started logging my daily eating and exercise. Mainly just to have a record and see trends. Sure, I could write it down but posting it publicly keeps me honest and sort of forces me to get out for my walk. I feel like an idiot posting ‘nothing’ under exercise. Yay for public shame! :p To keep it simple I installed an email to post plugin for WordPress. Since I’m always in my email I start a draft in the morning and add to it as the day goes on. After my shower in the evening I finish it up and don’t eat after that.

Earlier in the week I got ‘5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth‘ by The Oatmeal. Silly title I know but The Oatmeal is awesome. He does all sorts of web comics over on his site. They always give me a good laugh so when the book came out and even though I’ve seen most of the material I thought I gotta support this guy. Also on order are 2 posters of his comics which I cannot wait to get.

This week I also received my NetTalk Jack from Wal-Mart. The NetTalk is just like MagicJack except it doesn’t need a computer to work. Setup was a breeze and so far it works great. I’ll have a review within the next week or two. We have another new phone number. :eek: Mom’s not to happy but I did get a local exchange and easy to remember number. For now I have Magic Jack setup to forward to the new number until it expires in July.

I closed one hosting account on a server that was always having issues and opened a hosting account with 1and1. I’ve had my problems with 1and1 but their hosting is okay for non mission critical sites. I bought a few new domains too. Not sure exactly what I’ll be doing with them but I’ll figure it out.

Yesterday, my landlord’s handyman showed up to put down new linoleum in the kitchen. The landlord gave me a roll of linoleum almost 2 years ago expecting either me to put it down or hire someone to do it. It’s been sitting in the hallway ever since, lol.  I don’t know how to put down a floor and I know if I put it down wrong he would expect me to pay for it. On top of that, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay someone to fix something that is the landlord’s problem. If I ruined the floor I would’ve paid for it. The tiles were already cracked when we moved in. They got worse because we had no heat in the kitchen for 4 years! If the landlord was otherwise decent I’d eat the c-note but since he’s a cheap mofo and tries to blame me for all kinds of crap in the building so I won’t lift a finger for the clown. Anywho the linoleum looks nice. He’ll be back next week to tack the molding down.

My new desk chair turned out to be small for my big ass. I gave the chair to the handyman as a tip. That chair was $50 bucks.  Ziggy, the handyman is a hard working dude and always goes the extra mile for us so I was happy to give it to him.

Our oven is out again. The burners work but the pilot on the oven won’t stay lit again. Every couple of month the pilot just decides to go out. We call the technician to the tune of $80 a pop. The technician makes all kinds of adjustments and eventually gets it lit. One time the poor guy was here 2 hours. To the landlord’s credit he did put a brand new stove in here 3 years ago. Only after we went without a stove for a year! The stove has been nothing but problems since we got it, probably because the landlord installed the natural gas to propane conversion kit on his own. He’s the jack of all trades/screw up everything type.  For my .02 you don’t mess around with gas appliances unless you know what you’re doing. We burn in the neighborhood of $95/month in propane just for the stove which shouldn’t be as we don’t even cook every day.

The Flinstone-mobile is on the fritz again. I had an appointment scheduled today (Saturday) with the mechanic to check out a tire with a slow leak and put in a new headlight bulb. I’ll be damned if I can figure out  how to get the new bulb in. D’Oh! On Thursday, I left to do laundry and stopped to adjust the wiper blade only to notice smoke coming from under the hood. I popped the hood and see it was coming from near the radiator. Got back in the car and seen the temperature gauge was in the red zone. I guess laundry was out. It’s too bad because I was looking forward to getting Chinese. Thank God it happened where it happened as I was just about to lose cell service and there’s no cell service the rest of the way. Got ‘er home and parked her.

Luckily, my neighbor lent me her car to follow mom over to the garage this morning. Our mechanic hasn’t had a chance to look at it yet. I’m hoping it’s nothing more then a bad hose and praying it’s nothing more then a water pump as if it’s anything more than a $200 job it’s going to the junk yard.  I’m guessing it’s a head gasket only because I smelled antifreeze burning. The car is just not worth it. We’ve had it just under a year and for what we paid we more than got our money out of it. The rear end is in need of about a $1000 worth of work. It needs new struts and a cross spring that costs $500 alone. For a 16 year old car with a 150,000 miles on it’s just not worth it. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s with a new water pump but where I live you need a car to do anything.

If it’s the head gasket and we have to junk the Flinstone-mobile it may be a blessing in disguise as with the rear end the way it is I’m risking a blow out and possible accident every time I drive it.

On a positive note I had to use the building’s laundry room and the dryer worked this time instead of eating my money. Hopefully it will continue to work. If we have no wheels for a while that’s the only place I can do laundry.

Overall aside from the car screwing up this was a good week. :)