Part 1: Cutting Cords and Reducing Fees with America’s Worst Corporation
Part 2: Antenna Madness!
You remember the last time I dealt with Time Warner Cable, one of America’s least favorite corporations, right? I had decided to purchase my own modem so that I could return the Time Warner-issued modem they had given us in 2009, which in 2011 they suddenly decided was a rental that everyone needed to pay a monthly fee to rent.
New sci-fi modem, owned free and clear
For now, I’ll leave aside the ethics of giving someone something for free, and then years later deciding to automatically deduct an amount from their checking account as a “rental fee.” No, I won’t take them to task on that point for acting like a bunch of money-grubbing shit-stains who would probably break into senior citizens’ homes and straight-up rob them if they could get away with it. No, I won’t bring up that old complaint.
I won’t even talk about how, when I returned the modem, they continued to charge me for the modem I returned to them. I won’t mention how it must’ve been either a pathetic attempt to get away with charging a customer without them noticing, or a shocking display of technological ineptitude, as if their customer service software was created on an IBM 1401 by a room full of starved monkeys punching holes on punchcards. (The monkeys are starved because Time Warner was too cheap to buy them bananas) No, that’s in the past!
Today I want to talk about how I finally canceled ourTime Warner cable subscription:
Marge and I are not a big money-earner for Time Warner. We have an internet subscription, yes, but beyond that only had a Basic Tier tv plan. That is their lowest cost tv subscription, topping out at a whopping ten channels, give or take. It’s $9.99 a month, plus a dumb broadcast fee and taxes.
I know more and more people are “cutting the cord” and cancelling their cable to only watch tv streaming over the internet with Netflix and Hulu. Well, we wanted to do that, but had one problem, and his name was Charles Osgood.
Charles Osgood’s CBS Sunday Morning was the only reason we still had a cable subscription, as weird as that sounds. Doesn’t CBS broadcast over the airwaves for free? They sure do, but despite my best attempts, I could not pick up the signal.
So as it is right now, we might be the only people in the country who cut the cord after getting a subscription to the CBS All Access. What’s CBS All Access, you ask? What, you’ve never heard of it? Well imagine a Netflix where everything sucks and there’s no movies. Better yet, imagine Hulu, but it’s only their weird old tv shows.
CBS All Access is the bottom of the barrel internet tv service that allows you to watch, on demand, such horrible tv shows as The Big Bang Theory and Madam Secretary (neither of those are porn, by the way).
But CBS All Access does have one thing going for it: A live stream in some markets! That means we could watch CBS Sunday Morning! … If we were in the right market. For whatever godforsaken reason, don’t even get me started, since we live near Albany, we’re not allowed to watch the live stream. I know, don’t even try to think about it too much. This is a station run by 90 year olds. They don’t understand the internet, okay?
Is there a workaround? Yes, there is. I’m not even going to write it up here for fear of ruining a good thing, but you can trick a certain browser into believing you live in another location. So when we watch CBS Sunday Morning, it thinks we live in Boston, a market that is allowed to watch the live stream, and we get to see all of their adorable local advertisements.
This doesn’t come without a cost, though. CBS All Access is $5.99, about half of our basic cable plus fees. But I look at it this way: As part of our Sunday routine, we pay $1.50 to watch Charles, about the cost of the Sunday newspaper. Seems appropriate.
I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about my harrowing subsequent experience of finally cancelling the cable. It started off as horrible as could be. I made four attempts to call Time Warner to cancel our cable:
1. I called customer service and got the voice recording. I told it I wanted to cancel my service and it put me on hold. A man answered the phone. I told him I wanted to cancel my cable service. He put me on hold. A minute later, the phone hung up on me.
2. I called customer service again and got the voice recording. I told it I wanted to cancel my service and it put me on hold. A woman answered the phone. I told her I wanted to cancel my cable service. She put me on hold and I stayed on hold so long that I gave up and hung up on my own.
3. I called customer service again, determined to get the job done this time. I told the voice recording that I wanted to cancel my service and it put me on hold. A woman answered the phone. I told her I wanted to cancel my service. She promised to forward me to the correct department. I was put on hold and another woman answered the phone. I told her I wanted to cancel my service. She asked for all of my information, forwarded me to another department, and put me on hold. Another woman answered the phone and asked for all of my information again. I told her my bill number and she said she literally could not help me cause my bill number didn’t make any sense. That she had never heard of a bill number that started with a 3. She put me on hold again. I hung up.
4. I called customer service and and got the voice recording. After struggling through the voice-controlled menu, it asked me what I was calling about. I said “Cancel service,” and the voice literally said, “I can’t understand you. Goodbye” and hung up. Now the robot was actually dissing me!
I had one more option. I had to go to the Time Warner Cable store at the gosh-darn mall! The belly of the beast! I never go to the mall to begin with, and definitely never into those weird, unnecessary telecom stores. But at least this is where my story turns around.
I don’t know the name of the agent who helped me, but she gave me no trouble at all. Not only was it simple as a button push, as it should be, to stop our cable, but for my hassle, she gave me the promotional rate on our internet for the next year! So instead of $57.99 a month, it’s now $34.99. Score!
So what’s the moral of the story? Maybe Time Warner Cable isn’t the worst corporation after all.
… Nah, yes they are! Fuck you, Time Warner! You suck!