Shanti’s Dispatches

The great thing about Kiva (and micro-credit in general) is its great historical repayment rate, usually 96% or higher.

One of my loans has been repaid. Just pledged another one to Namig Farzaliev, a shoe salesman/vendor in Sumgayit city , Azerbaijan.

Note: the above banner will switch to a random Kiva entrepreneur once Namig’s loan has been fully funded.

Azerbaijan on Wikipedia (Yeah, had to look that one up)

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!