Friday, January 30, 2009

the steads vs the cable company

so, we've never really been fans of the cable company here. they're over-priced, and they're the only cable option, so they seem to get away with murder.

occasionally i'll catch one of their commercials that brags about their customer approval rate, and i always wonder who it is that likes their cox cable service. their customer service representatives are second only to walmart.com in the worst service ever. if they ever sent me a survey, i'd have to make my own bubble and say "excruciatingly painful" for every interaction.

so after ordering the cable service online, waiting the three day period, and not hearing anything about when they were coming to install service, we did the thing that we hated doing more than anything... we called. turns out someone is using scott's social security number (but with their own name and address... does that mean cox cable's data entry person made a typo?) and has not paid their bill. we have to come in.

we started shopping for other options, but i'm a creature of habit and i'm comfortable knowing that mtv is channel 40, hgtv is 54, cnn is 34. we didn't want to change. so we thought we could just open the account in my name... right? because no one is using my name/social to have a cable account.
not the case. they have an open account in my name. seriously? we just purchased a house and none of this was on our credit report for us to straighten out. account is delinquent from 2005. ridiculous!

it was only $60, and we finally decided that living without cable/internet wasn't something we wanted to do... so we thought we could just call, pay the amount, and set-up the new account.

cox told scott they wouldn't open the account because our address was attached to the several attempts... so we would need to go in to their office during business hours to set up service.

we finally gave up, but we were frustrated. then magic happened! because scott is an at&t management employee, we get the highest speed DSL for $10 a month. we ordered directv (not the dish, because we got bad reports) for less than what basic cable costs, and the total price is HALF of the "competition" (the cable company). amazing! maybe i should have paid attention to those directv commercials a long time ago.

now we just have to reclaim our identities!!


we obviously need a bigger tv!

2 comments:

Amy said...

man that sucks. cox sucks. when they installed our stuff they kept trying to make me do the resets on the box (because it wouldnt work). then when the decided that it was a bad box, instead of going and getting a new one and finishing with us, they decided they would leave and go do another job and come back like 2 hours later. well FF 2 hours and they're not back, so i call the guy and he says hes on his way. another hour goes by and still nothing. so i call cox, and of course they put me on hold, for like 20 min! it took like an entire day to get it all done and i was so pissed by the end. it was ridiculous.

Melanie said...

I hate Cox, too! We have someone else now :)