It's been 3 days since message 2A2010VXZAAGP and I have heard only silence. A full month since I first reported the problem with my cable.
A month of football inspired by Picasso in his cubist phase. A month of television broadcast by Salvador Dali. A month of dramatic dialogue interpreted by Porky Pig. A month of psychedelic pictures affecting one end of this node to the other.
A month of customer service Machiavelli might describe as Byzantine and internecine. A month of each call being treated as a new problem rather than an ongoing issue. A month of problems so layered that a diagram would look like an onion with no apparent center. A month of right and left hands not exchanging handshakes. A month of interdepartmental Darwinism.
By the time you get a tech out again, it will have been another week with no one addressing the problem, no one ensuring it's been resolved, no one taking ownership.
Soon, it will no longer be my problem. And I won't wait another month.
© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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Yes, this is my actual, submitted comment/complaint to Bright House Network's Office of the President. I will give it to them for forcing me to be creative by only giving me 1000 characters to work with.
In the month we've tried to get this problem fixed, I've had a costumer service rep blame our analog television for the digital noise we're seeing. I've also had a tech tell me he prioritized his repairs based on how much a customer paid each month. The last tech showed me the work order which had the problem marked as a network/field issue, but was assigned to him (an inside tech) anyway. Two years ago, I was told it was company policy that 3 inside techs had to come out (to the same house) before customer service would mark it as a network problem. And that once a problem was closed by a tech, it could not be reopened, even if the "fix" didn't correct the problem.
Kind of scary what you learn as you peer behind the corporate curtain.
As an added perk, I received a notice on Saturday that my rates are going up in March. They didn't seem to have a problem getting in touch with me for that.
Final Observations:
ReplyDeleteEach time they came out, Bright House diagnosed something as wrong and fixed it. They replaced the line from the junction to the house (spliced when Progress Energy cut it), the line from the pole to the junction and junction to junction as well as the junction (junction leaking signal to ground), readjusted the amplifier (improperly set to thermal instead of auto-gain control), replaced 800' of overhead cable (25+ years old, cracked and under spec), and finally the box (Easter egg hunt).
Each stage showed some improvement, but the problem was still there. When they came out the last time, the sweep tech said it was my TV. He said it couldn't keep up with the refresh (uh, it's analog cathode-ray tube, that's as fast as it gets), then it was specific to Sony (uh, my neighbor is seeing it on a different brand), it was a bad digital buffer in the TV (uh, doesn’t have one and it works fine with the box on some channels and not others. My DVD player is crystal clear. To the TV, that is always channel 4), it was motion based (uh, some football games were fine, others broke up, and some action movies have no problem), it depended on the camera the original signal was shot with (???). Finally, it was that I was just being picky about the picture and it would never be perfect (uh, it's breaking up, you saw it and said it wasn't acceptable. That's asking for perfection?).
I asked why if it was my TV, I could record it on their DVR, play it back frame-by-frame, pause it and still see it. The DVR only records their signal, whether my TV is on, or there, or not.
He said he was going to talk to someone, get a monitor to test it and come back. He never did. I got another call an hour later saying to call again when it was happening so they could send someone out to see it. Uh, you just had someone here. He saw it and said it was bad. Oh. They wanted to drag it out another 2-3 days to run their test. I didn't have it in me. So I told them to disconnect video service instead.
As a final note, when the BHN contractor tech came to disconnect video service, he mentioned that the BHN ground block at the house was not installed, and that he had connected it. He also said it looked like it needed to be replaced. Interesting that I mentioned several times on Monday that this problem looked like a ground issue based on my years of comm systems debug as an electrical engineer.
That's how close they came to a positive resolution.
Just happy that it’s no longer my problem.