Sometimes You Have To Laugh
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Since several weeks have passed since I last indulged in a rant about Time Warner, perhaps you have been thinking that all is well. Not so. My clients are evenly split between those who use DSL and cable. None of them are on dial-up. However, both old and new clients come to me to ask which is best, and should they consider switching to take advantage of whatever the latest come-on sale is being offered. How can I answer that?
From my perspective, your Internet provider is like a stomach. When it’s working right, you don’t know it is there. But when anything goes wrong, you realize how much you depend on it. In addition to reliability, a good provider should recognize that it is a service. Good human interactions are a must. There is more to being an ISP than bits coming down a wire.
Which brings us to my dilemma of what to recommend to my clients. In the last couple of weeks, the Internet service seems to have been reasonably good, but the email service has disappeared at random intervals for long enough that I received calls from clients to come fix their computers. I can live with that. But what do you make of the Time Warner billing? It is so sad that I have stopped being angry and just laugh at it.
Our troubles started when the company threatened to cut off service because we had not paid our bill, but my wife assured the representative that we had indeed mailed off a check in plenty of time. What is the issue? We are good customers. The person on the other end would hear nothing of it. Our record meant nothing to them, and our credibility must have been non-existent because they only responded when my wife authorized a transfer from a credit card. Time passed, and all seemed well - or as well as it can be given the situation. Then we received a statement showing that we had a substantial credit and need not pay anything. Someone had found our check and cashed it. Only there was a problem with that check. After authorizing the payment by credit card, my wife did the prudent thing and stopped payment on it. Sure enough we quickly got a firm letter notifying us that - guess what? - the check bounced. The company seemed to have re-categorized us as deadbeat slugs who try to pass off bad checks.
As I say, we used to get angry at this general ineptitude. Now we laugh. That is a defensive measure designed to preserve our health. Of course we could change to DSL, but then we would lose our email addresses. Similarly we could switch from cable to satellite, but would either change be in our best interest?
The last time I compared bits per dollar for cable and DSL, cable was better. I have no good statistics for the local reliability of DSL to compare with Time Warner. Assuming the various billing snafus are due to the ongoing flail from Time Warner buying Adelphia and changing the systems, is cable to better choice? Adelphia might have been bankrupt, but at least the statements were correct.
Long time readers of this column might remember that the reason we went with cable in the first place was that it was available while the phone company told us for two years that DSL would be available in our locale in two weeks. That left a really bad taste in my mouth.
What do you tell your clients? Obviously the situation is different at different locales, but surely there are some underlying constants. Signing up for a service based only on the bits downloaded per dollar is roughly as silly as buying a computer based only on CPU clock speed. Yet I know people who do both. Given everything that has happened, my response has been to share information with clients as fairly as possible and tell them that they have to decide for themselves. That is a copout since I am supposed to be giving them advice, but it works.
Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.
[tags]Time Warner, cable, dsl, internet provider, ISP, customer service, laugh[/tags]
5 Comments
Mike Nelson
March 1st, 2007
at 1:44am
So, they contacted you about the canceled check. When you informed them that they insisted that they didn’t receive your check, and since you had already paid it, but to satisfy them, you paid by credit card and canceled the check because obviously they lost it, I am just wondering what was their excuse and reaction. Please, don’t leave us hanging, LOL
eldergeek
March 1st, 2007
at 2:11am
In our case, we were paying $24 a month for basic telephone and $20 a month for dial up service. When we switched to Verizon DSL our total monthly bill, which included basic telephone service and DSL was $38 a month. With any other available high-speed service our cost for telephone and internet service, added together, would have tripled instead of going down a few dollars. Our DSL isn’t quite as fast as the other alternatives but it’s more than adequate for our needs and, far more important to us, we could afford it. The other high speed services are beyond our means.
In your place I’d tell my customers what options are available, what they cost, which one I’ve chosen, and why. Given the facts, they can make their own decisions.
As always, I very much enjoy reading your posts. Thanks.
Don Crowder
Jacques Dupont
March 1st, 2007
at 9:03am
Hi Sherman,
You absolutely must let your readership know about Geriatric1927 adventure on YouTube. THis a very moving and engrossing experience in both IT and social engineering.
Keep the good work
JD
Randy C. Austin
March 1st, 2007
at 10:59am
OMG that is too funny. I just had an almost identical experience with my own ISP (GCI).
The only difference was that after they had not received my check and I was giving them my credit card info so I told them that I was stopping payment on the check and under no circumstances should they attempt to cash it.
So of course, a few days later they tried to cash it, which generated a letter describing what kind of heathen I was - even though the account had no balance.
When I called and asked how this could happen when the notes on my account clearly stated that the check should not be cashed, the explanation I got was, “The person who handles the checks doesn’t use a computer”
teqjack
March 10th, 2007
at 12:15pm
OK, so I’m late getting here. But a couple of things mentioned I have experience with that might give you some ideas, so…
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1 “Of course we could change to DSL, but then we would lose our email addresses”
? I have NEVER used an ISP’s EMail, except to get their announcements [which I look at about once a year, LOL] for just this, dating back to the dial-up years.
I use as primary ([newsletters, software companies, bill payment receipts...) YAHOO (has a good spam filter), secondary EXCITE (for family and friends), and may use GOOGLE (if I can strip out all the gadgetry). Some idiot vendors and blog-comment handlers do not allow "free" EMail for fear of spammers - for them I use WOWMAIL (the filters do not recognize this freebie), which is a horrible experience with lots of popups I suppress but usually only has 1 message a week I even look at before deleting.
I have changed ISP more than six times, and never bothered to worry about "losing" my EMail addresses.
Also, this means I do not need to use OUTLOOK (or 3d-party, like Mozilla) - I deleted it from my system as soon as I could (XP lets you, I don't think Win98 did without a lot of registry hacks) and told MS[auto]Update to stop even notifying me of it and its patches. I very much disliked OUTLOOK when I used it many years ago and doubt improvements are significant.
I think there are some re-direct services available, I never paid a lot of attention, which can route the “lost” at-sign EMail if it happens: most will not go to that level, but I think a couple do…
- - - -
2 “The last time I compared bits per dollar for cable and DSL, cable was better”
? Well, yes - and no. I switched from DSL (Veizon) to cable (COX) because the cable was faster and about the same price - within a dollar - and, most important to me, cable is a monthly service while DSL was actually a yearly contract: move (I rent, and am trying to get into retirement/subsidized housing to stretch my SocSec income) and lose.
**BUT** an upgraded DSL, much faster, is available here as an option and I might have tried it except it does not currtently have the thirty-day trial period, you must sign up for at least a year.
Well, when fiber-optic becomes available…