Tag: Time Warner

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How Bad Is Time Warner?

Yellow infrastucture for Huntington Hills Center
Yellow infrastucture for Huntington Hills Center

What a pleasant topic for a blog post. You should hear this idiotic, fifteen second loop that Time Warner has me listening to while I’m on hold. On hold for as long as I can stand it. It has been fifteen minutes. I am being punished for asking for a supervisor.

We are moving my parent’s internet connection to their new address and I was to meet TW there at 11AM. I gave them three phone numbers to reach us at and they didn’t call any of them. They just didn’t show up. I called them at 1, worked my way through the automated 800 maze and got a representative who said “the appointment was cancelled, sir.” “Cancelled by who?” I asked. “It doesn’t say.”

When the service manager finally got on the line, he told me the soonest TW could get there would be Friday, three days away. I was starting to lose it but doesn’t everybody do that with Time Warner? I tried to control myself. I know their business model. Controlled rage on the customer’s part gets special pricing. “OK, I found an opening for Thursday afternoon,” he said. And I’m supposed to be happy? I recapped how they blew me off and the guy relented. “OK, I’ll wave the 49.95 service charge.” I screamed at this point. I had only been quoted 19.99 for the service charge!

I told him Frontier was offering a DSL connection for 19.99 a month and I was thinking of canceling TW unless he could make me a better deal. He lowered the monthly quote to 41 bucks and I took it. He had the nerve to tell me to have a nice day as I was hanging up. Comcast can have them.

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We Brought The Revolution Closer

Back-up helicopter pad at Strong memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York
Back-up helicopter pad at Strong memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from the Russian performance artist’s, Pussy Riot, says, “We are happy because we brought the revolution closer!” I’m happy for that. Nothing scarier than Russia’s new alliance between between church and state.

We had the coffee all set to go. Just push the button and head downtown to wait in line for the ticket office open so we could buy tickets to the US Women’s soccer game with Costa Rica. But the headlines on the morning paper said the ticket sale would be delayed. Eleven thousand were already sold to season ticket holders. Big bummer but nothing compared to our friend, Bill’s situation.

We took him over to the Wilmot Cancer Center for his daily dose of radiation, a tactic intended to shrink the tumors in his brain that spread from his lung cancer. We found him in good spirits, a better man than I imagine I would be in his spot.

On to the days’ other pressing issues. My father got a new modem from Time Warner and when the service guy left my dad was unable send or receive email on his desktop or iPad. All his settings were right. Nothing had changed on his end. I was stumped. I tried collecting email through the browser at the Roadrunner site and as soon as I typed in my father’s email address it autofilled with “@roadrunner.com” rather than “@rochester.rr.com.” This required a call to Time Warner where a technician determined that the serviceman had never set-up the modem to go to the Rochester server.

My parents switched their land line to Time Warner about a year ago so the incoming caller is displayed on their tv and all but they never set up the feature to route call waiting calls to Time Warners answering service so when they are on the phone and I try to call them it just rings and rings. People that know them are familiar with my father’s message on his home answering machine and they have learned that if the phone keeps ringing it just means they are on the line. But people who don’t know them, like the the garage door repair man, just assume their phone does not work. So we looked on Time Warner’s site for the old fashioned option of “engaging a busy tone.” What a concept.

This was not easy. i had to call Time Warner again and a women who was clearly reading instructions from a monitor talked me through setting up an account in my father’s name and then accessing a control panel were I could “turn off call-waiting” even thought they had never set it up and then “engage busy signal” and hit “Save.”

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Sincerely, Corporate Customer Care

Leaves on the ground in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY
Leaves on the ground in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, NY

A few years ago Time Warner blocked free access to the newsgroups, the bulletin boards that were older than the internet. We were one of the first customers in this area when TW test marketed their Roadrunner service and I remember telling everyone how great their service was. Yesterday they sent us this little note.

Dear Road Runner Subscriber,
You are receiving this email because you have used the Personal Home Page service that Road Runner provides. 

Road Runner will no longer offer the Personal Home Page service, effective January 31, 2011.
Sincerely,

 Road Runner 
Corporate Customer Care

I don’t even remember how to access our personal homepage but for the last ten years my father has maintained a small site about Brighton’s brick industry on his personal home page so I called him to discuss moving the site. I’d move our internet access too if I had choice.

While I was on the phone with my father he described this recent Ann Telnaes’ cartoon and asked if I had read the article about the worm that got into the computer’s controlling Iran’s nuclear arsenal. I had sort of skimmed it so I went back to it. It reads like a real game changer. If only we had disarmed Iraq’s weapons that way. Wait, they never had any.

My father also asked if I had seen James McMullan’s newest entry to his blog on drawing. I had not. How does my fatrher keep up with all this? I just spent the last hour here and I plan to go back for more as soon as I get a little work done.

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Definitely Not The Norm

Peggi digs out a stump
Peggi digs out a stump

Peggi and I had been chipping away at this big tree stump for about a week. It was here when we moved in and we thought we would get rid of it once and for all. In fact we already had a new Rhododendron bush sitting in a pot waiting to go in the hole. We bought it at WalMart. We were there on other business and we wandered into the “Garden Center”. Peggi asked a worker if they had any lilacs and she took her over to some small purple hyacinths that were blooming. Peggi asked the clerk if she had ever been to Highland Park for the Lilac Festival and she said she hadn’t. So we bought a Rhododendron.

Time Warner sold us on a digital phone package that will reduce our RoadRunner bill and they were switching the lines but the install went bad and we were off line for most of the afternoon so we dove into this project. Our neighbor, Jerod, got involved and he brought his back hoe up to lift the stump out once we had cleared away most of the dirt. Time Warner couldn’t get our new modem to communicate with downtown and at one point we had four TW trucks out in our driveway. The supervisor told us “this was definitely not the norm”. That was oddly reassuring.

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