Cox Communications Catching Dolphins in the Net, Doesn’t Care at sablog.com

Cox Communications Catching Dolphins in the Net, Doesn’t Care

Written by Shanti A. Braford May 5th, 2007in Rants.

Cox Communications’ solution to lazy field techs:
Shut Off all customers’ service & wait for the legitimate ones to call in to complain.

Sorry for the following rant post.

The only slightest, minutest chance we have of any of these big monopolists actually reforming their ways is if enough people complain on their blogs, etc. Sometimes only government intervention does the trick, but usually that doesn’t even work.

Timeline of Events

5/4/07 - 1:07pm - Notice Internet is out. Engrossed in a project, don’t pay much attention to this fact. Bad idea.

5/4/07 - ~3pm - Internet still out. Uh oh. Also check the Cable TV — guide still works but the signal is out. This has happened before.

5/4/07 - 3:10pm - Call up the girlfriend to get the phone # for cox. Sucks when the net is out! You realize how dependent you are on Mr Google and the interweb.

5/4/07 - 3:15pm - First call to Cox. Get sucked into the mire of a computerized voice troubleshooting walkthrough. I know exactly what the problem is; this has happened before. Walkthrough goes something like this:

Cox voice cpu: Okay. . . Unplug the power cable from your Cox Cable modem.
Me: Yeah, I already tried that, bitch.
Cox voice cpu: I’m sorry . . . I didn’t catch that. Please say again.
Me: Fuck you, just get me a fucking human operator please.
Cox: It sounds like you’d like to speak to an operator.
Me: No shit.
…

Somehow get disconnected.

5/4/07 - 3:15pm - Second call to cox. Speak to a generic entry-level grunt (friendly for their somewhat shit job, to give them credit on that front). The next available apointment is today (5/5/07) at 3pm.

I was supposed to go down to Tucson, to see my mom & grandma, who just got out of the hospital from triple-bypass surgery. Yeah, it was a double-whammy.

Since I couldn’t go without Internet until later Monday, I rescheduled the Tucson trip, just for retarded-ass Cox.

I also value my productive work time at somewhere between $60 / hour or more. At 12 hours of lost productivity (I was on a role, and ran out of non-net based work), that’s $720 hours of my time. Wifi was down and Phoenix sucks for net cafes (plus I don’t have a *nix laptop), so that option was out as well. (Yes I thought of that…)

5/4/07 - 3:20pm - Still pissed; call up Cox again for a second attempt at speaking to a supervisor. I remember reading a while back if you make enough calls (usually 7-10) you can usually eventually get a hold of just about anyone, or at least their gatekeeper. If I could just get the name of the outsourced service they use for the cable hookups/disconnects, then maybe I could sweet-talk, or bribe, one of the techs to come out again.

This time I get ahold of a 2nd-level up manager, who again was very nice for what is probably a very shitty job as well. Dealing with assholes like me (only when I’m dealing with repeated institutional or individual incompetence w/o attempt at improvement) who ask to speak to people’s managers (her).

She did one of two things:

1. Lied and said there was no way for them to get ahold of Field Services other than through their little scheduling program. (I already had a 3-5pm appointment for the next day)

Do you really think middle/upper management “hides” or somehow prevents these people from actually knowing / having the phone number of field services? I can think of a ton of scenarios where it’d be incredibly helpful for the Cox tech support team @ their call centers to be able to get ahold of the field techs live. So I’m calling BS here.

2. Or she really legitimately does not have a way of getting ahold of these people.

Okay - back to the timeline.

5/5/07 (Today) - 1pm - Cox rep calls a bit early because he was in the area. When he arrives, he explains that every once in a while, Cox has a policy of going through and disconnecting all of the hookups in a complex.

Again, this is caused by HQ’s lousy relationship with field services. Apparently some Cox techs blow off disconnects, so their answer is once a year or so, to disconnect every connection “just in case.”

He said only a few were reconnected - only those that were actually installed correctly & marked correctly over the years.

The rest of us (Dolphins) get caught in the net. We only get our service turned back on when we call in to complain.

On Monopolists

I don’t expect Cox to change. They have a virtual monopoly on broadband Internet (DSL tends to suck), and a monopoly on land-based Cable TV. (I’ve heard various accounts of DirectTV, they sound just as bad. Honestly I don’t give a shit if my tv goes out every once in a while — it’s not small business critical.)

I worked at a monopolist right after school (a very large telco). These companies are the laziest, most slow-moving, pathetic companies in existence.

Yet they still throw off billions in profit each quarter because of their position of power, not from innovation or delivering incredible value to their users.

That’s why I love startups.

Phew. Sorry for the rant! Have a great weekend!

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5 Responses to “Cox Communications Catching Dolphins in the Net, Doesn’t Care”

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1 Pissed Off on May 15th, 2007 at 6:23 pm

Thank goodness somebody has had the same experience as me. I had internet completely out (and I pay for “premiere” 12mb/s service) for 2h one day and 1h the next day and sat through their assanine voice prompt system and I had not only known but seen and spoke to the flippin Cox people while they were out at my building and asked them what they were doing and they told me they were upgrading equipment - hence I was almost positive the issue was with the equipment they just replaced. I complained via phone and email and gave them a bill of my time, wasted trying to get them to send out a technician to check their NETWORK and not my setup, which has never failed me since I set it up 3 years ago when moving to my current location. I kept getting the same responses, “it was internet rush hour”, “you have wife at home so its slowing your network”, “you are using a splitter” (um, excuse me, but how the &**% can one get internet and tv over the single cable that Cox places into our homes without a splitter and since when does a splitter reduce a 12mb/s connection to basically zero?). After being irate, they agreed to send a technician to MY PLACE. So I had to be home during the window. I told the guy on the phone that I would be happy to have the technician come see my lovely home, but they better send them to their boxes to check their network because I was 99.999% positive the issue was on their side. The technician came and told me the problem was my flippin splitter. I told him Cox had installed it and it wasn’t the problem. Before he could bullshit anymore, he got a call on his cell phone and he hung up and told me they had located the real problem - the new equipment they had installed which served a 15 BLOCK AREA down town was missing a filter and so the signal strength was too high and was cutting out people’s modems. I got back to *&^ COX and told them they at least owed me a special thank you if not to pay me the several hours I spent with their assanine techs for resolving a network issue that was THEIRS. Well, they credited me 4 (four) flippin dollars. Thanks to my ranting and complaining and bitching, 15 city blocks had their internet restored/improved and I got $4 and not even a thank you.

What’s worse, the reason I found this blog is because I am once again pissed off that my 12mb/s connection (which usually measures up to 15mb/s) was crawling and almost dead for 1h. Internet rush hour? Screw you cox.
2 Pissed Off on May 15th, 2007 at 6:26 pm

Oh and I forgot to add - screw that automated bitch. You cannot even hit 000000 to get a bloody human. For hesus’ sake, all I wanted to do was to ask a bloke if they were experiencing known network issues, but I had to sit with the bitch for like an hour doing all the unplugging and this and that before they transferred me. I kept getting “I can see your modem on the network but I didn’t get the right response from your modem, let’s try again”. Of course not bitch, the Internet is down. Duh you skanky ass whore. Sorry, sorry. Appologies.
3 Didi Jones on May 7th, 2008 at 12:47 am

The worst thing for me is that you can not talk to a real person!!