Time Warner = Incompetency

I love having cable TV and high-speed Internet....However, I HATE dealing with Time Warner Cable! Every few months there's a problem with this or that and I end up on the phone with some poor customer service rep or a technician is being sent to correct some malfunction.

This afternoon, while working from home, a man in a pick-up truck pulled up in front of the house, got out and came to the front door. Dave was not here and I'm always very cautious about opening the door to anyone especially if that someone wasn't scheduled to be there. I cracked the front door about 3 inches and the man announced that he was from Time Warner and he was there to disconnect our cable if I didn't hand over $139 in past due charges. EXCUSE ME?!

Why do things like this happen when Dave isn't around? I insisted that we had, in fact, paid our entire balance on December 28th and even pulled up our account on the computer and showed him that we had a zero balance. He called their office and they told him that the payment was returned NSF from the bank....yesterday.

There are many issues to address here, but first let me say that it turns out that NSF means there was some glitch between their payment system and the bank. It did not indicate insufficient funds on our part. Second, "delinquent accounts" are supposed to receive a courtesy phone call and then have 10 days to pay their balance before being disconnected. Funny...not only did we not get a phone call, we got less than 24 hours before being threatened with disconnection. They also wanted to charge us a "collection fee" for having to send out a contractor to collect the "past due amount."

We spoke with two different "customer service reps" and we are in line to receive a call from a supervisor. I finally just handed it off to Dave because I was getting angrier by the minute and nothing was getting accomplished. Of course, no one could answer our questions about why it took two weeks for their payment system to attempt to process the payment we made, why the payment was returned when there were sufficient funds available, why we didn't receive our courtesy phone call, why were we being disconnected when our current payment isn't even due until Jan. 16.

So now we are shopping around for other options. The problem is that there isn't another cable company in our area. So that means we would have to get satellite. Well, to have Internet with satellite you have to get DSL which requires a phone line. I don't presently have a home phone. So, do we stay with the morons at Time Warner or do we go completely in another direction and get the bundles package from Bell South which includes local and long distance calling, DSL, and DirecTv? I would like nothing better than to tell Time Warner to buzz off, but I'm trying to make a calm, informed decision.