Ever since Christopher and I "upgraded" to digital cable, we have had problems with it. And, what's really annoying about that is that we only switched over to it because, thanks to a sign-up special, it's actually less expensive than our "regular" cable was. Of course, with the regular cable, we could actually watch all of our channels. While, on the other hand, lately we've been missing a bunch of our channels. And those that we have are pixelating and stuttering like you wouldn't believe.
About two weeks after we got it, it was so bad that, when we called in, they couldn't get the box to reset and told us to bring it back for a brand new one. Possibly that should have been our sign to back out of the whole deal. But we decided to give the new box a chance.
It worked well for a few days. And the box is kinda small and cute and the remote's not too bad to deal with. And we've been really enjoying the On Demand TV shows. But the pixelation is causing us to lose some of our favorite channels because we just can't get them to come in.
So, for about the... I'm guessing 7th time... in the past couple of months, we called the cable company tonight. As luck would have it, there was a major cable outage in our area tonight, causing pixelation and momentary loss of both audio and video (over the course of 35 minutes on hold, I got that part memorized). The technicians (according to the recorded messsage) are working on it.
But, since we were basically down about half of our channels for the past week, and since I had nothing better to do while doing dishes and folding laundry, I stayed on the line until someone picked up. She was really sweet. Explained the whole "there's a major outage" deal, but then actually listened when I told her our continuing saga. And even tried a few minor work-arounds. I have no idea if they'll stick (we've had our box reset pretty much every time we've called), but before we got off the phone our channels were all back.
Here's the thing, though. While we were on the phone, she said that the phone queue was somewhere around 200 callers waiting to be helped. I can see how that would explain the 35-minute hold time before I got through. But, during my other calls, when there hasn't been a major outage, I've still been on hold for 20 or more minutes.
Wouldn't it seem like it would be better customer service to have more people on hand at all times, instead of making us listen to "we're experiencing higher than normal call volumes..." each time?
Or is it just me?
*Not usually one to name names when I'm complaining, I will say that this company's name starts with a C and rhymes with bombast.
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