Stupid stories about your cable company

I’ll go first:

In order for me to have the package I have at the lowest price, I have to have Time Warners stupid cable phone. Except I don’t want it. I wouldn’t ever use it or have a need for it. They gave me the modem and stuff but I never set it up. It just sits in the back of a closet.

So I took the modem back and said they might as well keep it. But they tell me if I return the equipment they have to change the package and my bill will go up.

So in order to save almost $40 a month I have to keep this stupid phone modem in my closet. Not a bad trade off I guess, but still idiotic. By removing a service my bill goes up instead of down.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Those bundled packages are nuts. Altho when we dropped our phone portion, our bill dropped - by $8/month. Of course, it has since gone up that much and more, while we’ve lost some channels. We have to have the higher tier of service to get the 3 or 4 channels we really like. I need to check out some alternatives - maybe Amazon or Hulu will be a better option. TV and internet shouldn’t cost $180/month. And we don’t even have an premium channels!

We have FiOS TV and internet. When the last contract ran out, I wanted to drop the TV and get just internet. Previously our TV and internet was ≈$110, including taxes and fees. The quote I was given for just internet: ≈$110, including taxes and fees. So I kept the TV but rolled the service back to just the “Local Channels” package, for… ≈$90, including taxes and fees.
Completely unrelated but amusing anecdote:

I have a friend who received and paid his Comcast cable bill, this was a few years back. The next week he was looking at his bank statement and it seems that Comcast ignored a decimal point because they had charged him $5,149 instead of the $51.49 on his bill. He calls them up and they fix it over the phone, refunding the $5,149 to his bank account, minus the $51.49 for his bill, and everything was square.

Then the next month, something peculiar happens: his Comcast bill showed a credit of $5,097.51. Being an honest person, he dutifully calls Comcast and explains the mistake. The friendly Comcast customer service representative assures him it is all cleared up.

The next month, same thing happens again; new Comcast bill comes in the mail showing a credit of $5,046.02. Again, being an honest person, he dutifully calls up Comcast and explains the error, even going so far as speaking to the manager, who of course assures him the mistake has been fixed.

This goes on for at least 6 months, each time my friend dutifully calling them to explain the error, each time going further up the management chain, each time receiving assurance the mistake has been fixed. After another few months and at least 9 or 10 total attempts to rectify the problem, my friend figures he’s done his due diligence and is now just enjoying his free cable (I figure at this point there’s still at least 5 years left on that credit).

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I am in the exact same situation with Comcast.

About two years ago, my high-speed internet started constantly disconnecting. I was told that my modem was obsolete, and that I needed a new high-speed cable modem. So I bought a new modem.

Shortly thereafter, whatever package we had expired, and I was informed that there was now no way to get a decent cable TV lineup (including HBO) and high-speed internet without getting their “Triple Play” package that includes a VoIP phone. However, we don’t want a VoIP phone that goes out when we lose power, nor do we want to risk losing our phone number during the transition.

They said I needed a new cable phone modem for the package, but I told them not to bother, since we had just bought a brand-new modem that was working fine, and weren’t going to use the VoIP phone service anyway. The rep said fine and put the package through. Two days later, our cable TV stopped working. :mad:

We then went through the whole setup again with a second rep. This rep thought that the issue was that we hadn’t given our recorded voice approval to all of the E911 disclosures for the phone that we weren’t using (even though we had). :rolleyes: The second rep assured us that everything was all set.

Two days later, our cable TV went out again. :mad: I was out of town on a canoeing trip with my son, and my wife refused to deal with Comcast in my absence, so I got home to find her royally pissed off at having no TV all week.

Upon talking to a third rep, it turns out that our order kept getting rejected by their “Quality Assurance” team, supposedly because we didn’t have their cable phone modem on our account. So I had no choice other than to have them send me their stupid cable phone modem. It’s still in the box, somewhere in our basement. We are charged $10.00/month rental for this unused modem. :rolleyes:

That’s bad enough, but what was worse was that it took something like five phone calls to resolve all of this, each call ranging from 45 minutes to over 2-1/2 hours! When our cable TV goes out (which it does now and again), I get sick to my stomach over the thought of calling them again.

I too have had negative experiences with Comcast cable, and fortunately, as the years pass, they are starting to fade…

Here’s a good story. A few years ago, I was hooking up our new TVs and needed some coaxial cable. As I’m on my way out of my driveway, I see a Comcast van on my block. I stop and explain to him my situation and he replied “Sure, what length do you need and should I put the connectors on”. :slight_smile:
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I only have internet through Comcast. And my bill is sent to my @comcast e-mail address, which I don’t use. I tried switching this to an e-mail account I do use and get the e-mail maybe once every 6 months.
So I have to log into my comcast account every month to find out the due date and exact amount, because they like to have the bill be a few cents different every month.
Now, for “security reasons” Comcast resets my password every 30 days. which means I have to call Comcast customer support every month to reset my password so I can see my bill because they can’t handle forwarding a statement to a gmail account reliably.

I tried to get Internet through Comcast/Xfinity, which we already had for cable TV. We already had Internet through our phone company, but Xfinity’s deal was better. So I called their customer service and got an appointment date and time for a rep to come out and set up the Internet. The day and time came and went, and no rep. So I called back and was told that there was no such appointment, and that nobody would ever have come out to install it, they would send the equipment out by mail or some delivery service, and I would have to install it myself. It told them that they obviously didn’t want the extra business, and rejected their offer.