posted 2007/05/26 at 22:25
About a week or so ago some of the channels on our cable boxes would not longer load for us. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which channels wouldn't come up, but it was only on the digital boxes; my sister still has an analog hookup in her room, so she got the channels just fine. Still, MSNBC was one of the channels that wasn't coming up for me, so I missed a few episodes of Countdown there. Worse yet, Versus and CBC were unaffected, so I did catch the demise of the Red Wings. Then our cable modem started going out sporadically, until the early part of this week when things got so bad that we were losing all cable television and Internet access for hours at a time. It took forever, but the cable company finally came over to fix things, but not before a whole lot of self-hair-pulling on the part of everyone in this house.
Now, were this just a matter of us losing cable television, I can kind of understand why the cable company wouldn't see restoring our connection as a big deal, even if I'm a big Red Wings fan and their season was about to come to an end. I could even understand them not seeing us losing Internet access as a big deal if we were just using it for residential purposes. However, even though the Internet isn't the primary tool my father uses for his job, it is a vital tool for him in terms of e-mailing his clients and uploading the things he's working on for his clients. For my part, all the work I've been swamped with these past few weeks kind of necessitates I be able to go up on the Internet to do stuff, even if I did have enough at the time to keep myself busy without Internet access, knock on wood. This may be a house, but this is still a house where a lot of business is conducted, and us losing our Internet access was a real problem, and I don't feel like the cable company was treating our outage with the seriousness it deserved.
Perhaps I wouldn't be harping on this so much if the cable company weren't already on my shit list. As I've mentioned before, our local cable company also owns the local paper, The Blade, and they've been locking out some of their unionized newspaper workers for an ungodly long period of time now, and then swamping the local commercial buys on their cable channels with propaganda pieces trying to argue their side of the story. These spots had really gotten bad for a while there, with the company's spokesperson -- a former local news anchor of some (by Toledo standards) prestige -- basically arguing that unions are responsible for every bad economic period for the past hundred years. For a while there the company toned things down, replacing the spots with interviews with replacement workers who talked about how great the company is and all, but now they've gotten worse than ever. The spokesperson is now openly name-dropping communism in the spots, and while I have no problem seeing this for the scare tactic that it is, I have to wonder what effect this new spot might have on people who don't know better. Needless to say, I really wish we could get DSL out here (and I don't know why because this is hardly a remote area) and just tell the cable company to go screw themselves, but unfortunately, as I mentioned above, high-speed Internet access is a necessity around here, and the cable company is providing the only affordable solution to that problem.
I feel like I need to mention here that my beef with this company is only with the management. I've seen how overworked (and underpaid) their cable repairpeople are, and there are a number of fine writers at their newspaper. I just have a real problem with the management there, and as much as I favour local ownership and companies over national conglomerates, times like these almost make me wish that the newspaper and cable company were part of a huge corporation, because they might actually be better for both our family and the community as a whole than what we have right now.
I've worked for both a phone company and a cable company, and I could tell you some horror stories about dealing with management.
And remember, you're paying for a service. It doesn't matter if it's just one channel out, or your internet just goes off for 10 minutes, you're paying for top service and you should not expect anything less. When you do you're letting them off the hook.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon