Dear Time Warner Cable,
As I am sure that you are already aware, you recently bought out my area's cable service with Comcast. You stayed true to your communications with me via regular mail and advertisements online and in the beginning the only difference I saw between my "old" and "new" service was the name on the bill. Unfortunately it didn't stay that way.
First it began with just little annoyances like finding out that my channel lineup didn't really change but you went on ahead and completely shuffled the channel numbers. I can almost forgive you that little change as your reasoning behind it actually made some sense. You told me you wanted to group similar channels together. That seemed logical to me. I was willing to overlook the fact that I was now going to have to reset all of my favorites again since you cleared them out with the channel changes. I was even willing to forgive you that you made me search through the channels for almost an hour to re-find the NOAA weather radar channel because your mailer describing the channels did not make this clear. Then I saw something that bothered me. I have six different ways to find each of my local stations! I can call up the main channel, which you tell me may or may not be in digital (that's fine), but then I can bring up the same station on another channel which is definitely in digital. Then there's the HD channel of the same station. If that's not enough, I can go to a different section of the channels and flip through the local, local digital, and local high definition station all right next to each other. You increased the number of channels I can flip through, but didn't touch anything in the way of increasing my actual content.
That's not all you've done to my channel lineup though. I pay for the full digital content, yet I cannot get all the digital channels you tell me I can get. I can pull up Speed on the regular lineup, however, when I try and pull up Speed in digital format you tell me I'm not authorized to view that station (even though your mailed listing tells me I can). I know that getting annoyed over not being able to watch the Speed channel in digital format may make me sound like some sort of a high-tech hick, but give me a break. You may have upped my HBO listings so that I can now watch HBO East and HBO West and see the same things on twice as many channels, but don't tell me on paper that I can watch the latest race in digital format and then deny me when I try to do it.
This morning though was the last straw for me. I awoke early to try and catch up on work, only to find out that my internet connection was out. No problem, I rebooted my cable modem. I cycled through the modem and router. I connected the computer directly to the modem. I did everything that your techs have told me to do in the past, and still nothing. The modem just sat there and slowly blinked it's way through all of it's lights, one by one. My first call to your customer service ended poorly. The entire time your rep kept telling me it was Comcast service I had and that even though they couldn't access the modem, there was nothing they could say or do really as there was no outage reported in the system. I scheduled a technician to come out on Sunday morning as that was the earliest time available. Sunday! it's only Tuesday now! Yet you tell me there's no problem in the area even though I can normally get a technician out here within two days, not five or more! The next call an hour later wasn't much more helpful. At least this guy could tell me that they could see the modem on the system but that they still couldn't ping it. So much for me working from home and getting anything done. Finally the modem stopped all it's blinking and google would load every once in a while. So I called your customer support back to see if they had found any problems or if they could tell me more about what is going on. I still couldn't get an answer, although this rep now told me that I had only about a 30% success rate with delivering packets. At least he admitted that there was a problem in the area because there were so many technician appointments scheduled. He actually sounded a little surprised when he say how many there were. However, I was told that I shouldn't worry as there was a strong chance that when a technician fixed the issue at one of my neighbor's houses that it would more than likely fix itself on my side as well. Please, don't patronize me.
Somehow the internet has once more figured out how to correct itself on it's own. Maybe you've done something on your end which has fixed my problem (although you'll never admit it). Maybe the little internet gremlins have left to go pester someone else (a more likely story in your eyes). I don't know and I really don't care at this point. All I know is that now I can deliver my little letter here out to the public domain so that maybe one day you'll read it.
Sincerely,
A most disgruntled, high-paying, long term customer
