I must applaud Bright House’s efforts to get our service back up and running.

I vented online, on this blog. We called Bright House to schedule an appointment, the earliest they had available was Monday (this was Thursday). After @mmagnolia22 called, I received an e-mail from one of their representatives, the NEXT MORNING there was a technician at our house.

The techinician traced the problem back to the lockbox at the curb. Someone had apparently disconnected our service again.

No one can give us a straight answer as to why our service has been delibrerately deactived more than once, but hopefully this has been the last time.

Our cable went out. Again.

Apparently it is impossible for Bright House to have too much bad attention. They must just love seeing bloggers vent.

I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone at Bright House, so I’m waiting to call in the morning. Here’s the letter I’ve drafted to their customer service e-mail, along with the translation of what I really mean.

To: customersupport.indiana@mybrighthouse.com
From: seth@sethkeever.com
Re: Service outage

TRANSLATION:
To: youjerks@thecablecompany
From: someonewhoistechsavvyenoughtohavetheirowndomainname
Re: Your crappy service 

To whom it may concern:

TRANSLATION:
I don’t care who you are, just read this and feel my pain

For the second time in a month, our service has been completely interrupted.

TRANSLATION:
Your crappy service really, really blows.

We are able to watch recorded shows on our DVR, but cannot view television programs on the cable box or through a TV hooked directly to cable. Our high-speed Internet service has also been interrupted.

TRANSLATION:
Your cable box may suck, but it’s not the root of this problem. Oh, and the only shows we have recorded are an old episode of The Daily Show, The G Word and Marie Antionette. Oh, and I can’t bitch about this on the Internet.

The last time this happened, one of your service technicians arrived at our apartment and discovered that the cable connection at the Bright House box on the side of the building had been unplugged. It took 7 days to get that technician to our residence.

TRANSLATION:
This is not the first time this has happened. Your service has failed us before. Last time I was apparently too nice on the phone and you did not understand the statement, “this is not acceptable.” Oh, and apparently the problem was with YOUR equipment. 

The agent on the phone offered to credit our account for the days our service was out. This is a nice gesture, but no amount of credits will keep our loyalty if our service continues to be inactive. Especially considering our jobs require Internet access.

TRANSLATION:
I don’t want $5 back on this month’s bill! I pay you to keep the service running. If you don’t figure out what in the hell is so wrong with your product, I will be forced to switch providers. And the “jobs” reference is supposed to make you look closer at the signature line of this e-mail which indicates I work at a TV station. 

We will call your customer service number in the morning to schedule an appointment.

TRANSLATION:
ARGH! 

–
Seth M. Keever

TRANSLATION:
My name isn’t the one on the bill. It’s @mmagnolia22’s.  

You’re never going to believe what happened on Wednesday.

Yes, I know it’s Friday. And I know it means I’m late posting this.

@mmagnolia22 was getting ready for work when the doorbell rang. She ran downstairs and found a Bright House installer waiting at our gate. Weird. They weren’t supposed to come until Thursday.

The gentleman on the other side of the fence asked where the Bright House box was for this block. She told him she didn’t know, but that our cable had been out for a week. He asked if we had an appointment for someone to come out, she told him that someone was supposed to be dropping by the next day.

That’s it. He leaves.

15 minutes later, @mmagnolia22 calls me and is recounting what has happened. That’s when the doorbell rings again. He’s back. He wants to take a look at our cable box. Why?

BECAUSE ALL OF THE CABLES AT THE BRIGHT HOUSE BOX WERE UNPLUGGED

What.

The.

Hell?

Cable works. Internet works. How and why would someone have unlocked that box and unplugged the cables?

Then Bright House calls @mmagnolia22. “One of our workers needs into your apartment.”

“I just let them in.”

“No, that was your neighbor’s apartment. We need in to your apartment.”

[At this point I think @mmagnolia22's head exploded]

“He was just in my apartment.”

“Well, he says he needs in to Apt. C, isn’t that your unit?”

“No. We’re Apt. B. We’ve tried to have you change our address.”

“Oh. Well, we still need in to Apt. C. Do you have a key?”

“NO! And the person who lives there is already at work. And she doesn’t even have cable. She uses Dish.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for your time.”

So I thought that our problems with Bright House had been solved.

To bring you up to speed, @mmagnolia22 and I recently moved up the street and had to have our Bright House service moved with us. They sent an installer to our new address 7 days after we moved. Completely acceptable, if I didn’t work in television and didn’t need the Internet to do my job.

The installer showed up, with an HD cable box in hand. He hooked everything up; I thought we had success. No picture. No signal. Nothing.

After another hour of him looking at splitters in the wall and talking to Bright House dispatchers, he told us he would have to have another installer come out when we could get access to the basement apartment. Great, now we have to disturb one of our new neighbors we don’t even know.

I schedule another appointment with Bright House.

It’s going to take 9 more days to get someone out to our apartment.

I complain.

My complaints on Twitter don’t go unheard, as I receive an e-mail from someone at Bright House. They offer to move up our install time. At this point I had already made it through the weekend without television. So, what were 5 more days when I would be at work?

Bright House sends out another installer. He finds that the line from the curb runs under all four units and in to the basement unit beneath us. The splitter is located in that apartment, and it wasn’t even hooked up. He puts the lines together. Tada!.

But wait. What about the Internet?

The tech didn’t realize we needed Internet as well, even though I showed him where the cable modem was when he arrived. So, he tried to the modem working. Nothing. He can’t get it to “lock down” with the rest of the system. Bright House dispatch sends him out to the curb and has him run a cable from the corner the whole way around the building up to our unit. Look at that, Internet works. Apparently, the signal isn’t strong enough for TWO TELEVISIONS AND A CABLE MODEM. He hooks up two two-way splitters to the cable running in to our unit. The first splitter goes to the cable modem and the second splitter, the second splitter then runs to both televisions.

Great, everything finally works. I can watch television and surf the Internet, no problem.

A week later, @mmagnolia22 says, “Have you been able to get our On-Demand channels to work? I keep getting ‘Error: 106.’”

Damn.

She calls Bright House, they have no idea what an “Error: 106″ is, but they’ll send a technician out. She also lets them know that they’ve had our address wrong since we moved here. They have it listed as Apt. C instead of Apt. B. Bright House says to change that address, they’ll have to cancel and disconnect our service and send another technician out to reconnect the service. I guess we’ll stay as Apt. C.

@mmagnolia22 takes care of everything this time, because it was a day I had to go to work early.

When I get home, she tells me that the installer they sent out that day said, “I don’t even see how you can get signal. You’re going to have to rerun every cable in the unit. I’ll schedule another installer to come out.”

What… the… hell?!

The technician sounded just like Keith David.

So, another installer came out this past Tuesday. The same installer from the second Bright House visit (we’re up to four now). He says the other technician was feeding us a line of bull, and there is no reason to rerun all of the cables.

Bright House still has no idea what “Error: 106″ means and this installer has no clue either, because he doesn’t have a cable box at home. [On a side note, I don't have an edit bay at home, but I know how it works because I use it every day at WORK.]

So, Bright House has him run another line from the curb to our unit, and amazingly the On-Demand channels work.

He runs a line from the basement unit, up to our unit, and On-Demand still works!

In our neighbor’s apartment, he then proceeds to disconnect the other three lines coming off the splitter, leaving ours the only one in tact.

On-Demand still works! Internet works! Regular cable channels work! It’s amazing.

Until Friday.

@mmagnolia22 watched television at 6:00am, everything worked fine.

I got up and went to watch television at 11:00am, and nothing worked. No television. No Internet. Nothing.

I called Bright House this morning. “We can have a technician out to you Wednesday afternoon.” What?! I inform the voice on the other end that we both work, and need a morning appointment (because without a job, we can’t pay for their awful service). “Well, then the earliest would be Thursday morning.” Fine. Whatever.

No idea where the problem came from. No idea about what the problem even is.

All I know, is that this will be five visits from a technician in two months, and I don’t think I want that many problems in the future.

Oh, satellite? What can you offer me?

I love my HDTV. There’s no question about that. I opt to watch all of the broadcasts stations on their digital channel, even if the program is provided in HD. The quality of the digital signal is far superior to the analog signal

So, I’m always looking for HD content to enjoy. Discovery, HD Theater, History Channel or even AMC- wait, we don’t get AMC HD? But we get HGTV HD? And TNT HD? Plus A&E HD? Even MTV HD?! What the hell? I wanted to watch Mad Men in HD; it must look FANTASTIC!

So, I decided to ask my cable company what the chances were of receiving AMC HD. Here was my question:

What are the chances of having AMC HD added to the Bright House channel lineup?

Here was the form letter I received back:

Thank you for taking the time to email XXXXX. Our goal at XXXXX is customer satisfaction and we are interested in our customer’s feedback. … We do not want to charge all our customers for “specialty” programming but still want to be able to provide High Definition programming and remain competitive. We look forward to offering more High Definition channels very soon.

Thank you for that boring and mind-numbing form letter. I would like to get back the time it took me to read that e-mail. Please send a check at your earliest convenience.

All I needed to know was, “the chances are about the same as President G. W. Bush’s library containing more than old copies of Boys Life magazine.

I thought venting about my recent call to Sprint (see Sprint Screws Me) would help ease my anger at their inability to do what the customer asks.

Whoops. I couldn’t be further from the truth.

On Sunday, a very nice customer service agent called me to inform me I was overdue on my payment. As I’ve previously explained, I knew about this and called customer service because I felt they were at fault. I proceeded to recount all of this to Sunday’s customer service agent, we’ll call her “Sun-gent.”

I told Sun-gent I had disputed the charges with another representative earlier in the week, and since I got nowhere with her I would be paying the bill in full and had dropped payment in the mailbox on Saturday. Note that I said, “the bill in full.” I was then asked how much of the bill they could expect. Note that I also said, “dropped… in the mailbox on Saturday.” I was then asked when I would be mailing them payment. I HAVEN’T EVER MISSED A PAYMENT, GIVE ME A BREAK.

Sun-gent then told me that I could pay my bill online. WTF? That’s where this whole thing began, apparently I cannot pay my bill online because my hardware is too high-tech. Here’s a recap from earlier:

“… every time I go online to sign up for a Sprint account I’m told that the activation code will be sent to my phone as a text message. Unfortunately, I don’t have a phone [I have an aircard]“

She told me that she would take care of canceling the scheduled service interruption. Perfect. I thanked her, and she told me that I would not be receiving any more calls regarding this matter.

Fast forward 24 hours. 24 hours EXACTLY. I get another call from Sprint.

I’m asked if I know about the late balance on my account. I tell this customer service agent, we’ll call her “Mon-gent,” that I talked with one of their representatives the prior day and had taken care of the problem. I’m then asked if I would be paying my bill in full. WTF?! Do they not keep records? Sun-gent kept telling me she was making notes to my accounts, was she just mashing her hands on the keyboard while I thought she was typing?! Mon-gent had no idea I had been called the previous day by one of their agents, and didn’t believe me.

No wonder Sprint needs my measly $61 so quickly. They’re doing everything twice. And still getting it wrong!

I’ve often talked about how much I like my Sprint aircard. I really do enjoy the convenience. Embedded in my laptop, EV-DO speeds and faster in some areas and absolute convenience.

I don’t have to pay for access in Starbucks or airports with their stupid pay-WiFi. I can get around restricted FTP access on the work network. And when the (now trashed) D-Link crap router goes out, I can still get online. (On a separate note, changed to a new Linksys router and confirmed it wasn’t a Bright House problem, but between the computers and the series of tubes).

On to the purpose of this post…

I’ve been sick of receiving a paper bill from Sprint for my aircard service, but every time I go online to sign up for a Sprint account I’m told that the activation code will be sent to my phone as a text message. Unfortunately, I don’t have a phone (and the Sony laptops with Sprint cards don’t have software like laptops with Verizon cards, which allow you to send and receive text messages).

So, I gave in and called customer service. I talked with a very nice agent for about 15 minutes while she tried to understand my problem. Finally we both came to agreement that I have an embedded card and not a phone. She told me she was going to put me on hold for a few minutes and come back with an answer. About 3 minutes later she rejoined our conversation to let me know that she could take my information and process the automatic payment request. The catch was that I would have to call back and sign up for automatic withdrawal again when my contract ends in July. No big deal.

This call was in the middle of April; I told her that I had already mailed in my payment due in April, so the automatic payments shouldn’t start until May. She understood and told me she’d set it all up. I gave her my credit card information, and thought it was done.

Not so fast.

I get my bill on Wednesday, and it says I haven’t paid my bill. I owe Sprint 2 months worth of payments. WTF? I’ve never missed a payment on anything in my life, now (because I didn’t check to see if May’s payment had been processed) I’m faced with a late fee and the mark that I’ve missed payments!

I called Sprint. Upset, but level headed and polite. I talked to a different customer service agent and explained the problem. She didn’t understand. At all. I told her that the original call (in April) was to set up an online account, but was told that their system wouldn’t allow them to set up an account for a number that can’t receive text messages. She verified that I called customer service, but had no record of a request for automatic payment registration. I told her that I spent 15 minutes talking to someone who took my credit card information to register for the service. She told me that I could enroll in automatic payments on the website.

WTF? I just spent 5 minutes explaining to her that I CAN’T REGISTER FOR AN ONLINE ACCOUNT BECAUSE SPRINT’S SYSTEM IS SCREWING ME. I was much more polite and did not talk in all caps.

She put me on hold for 5 minutes and talked to her supervisor. Then came back on and told me I could talk to their accounting department to pay my current bill and register for automatic payments. Forget that.

I’ll mail in my paper bill from now on. No matter what. The price of a stamp and a book of checks is well worth avoiding dealing with customer service, late fees and embarrassment.