OttoBlog
2007/06/06: Charter Cable Tech Support
This nightmare never ends.
I woke up this morning and had a sense of dread before opening the monthly bill from Charter Cable that showed up in the US mail.
That feeling was not unfounded, as the first thing I noticed was a charge for a digital converter that they picked up back in April.
Time to back up. A month ago, the monthly Charter Cable bill showed up, not only with charges from the previous month for said Converter, but also for the following month. Since Charter can't handle simple things via email, I called their "support" number and ended up having to talk to someone for two hours (English was obviously not their first language, despite Charter claiming that all their call centers are in the US and Canada). At the end of that call, they finally claimed they understood what the problem was and said they'd be sure to take care of it.
I was not convinced. And today's mail confirmed my doubts.
Not wanting to have to deal with the idiots on their phone bank, I decided to handle this via the internet (for which Charter gets over $2000 of my hard-earned money each year (the combined television and internet bundle)).
As I said, Charter won't allow people to simply send them email (they probably would claim to be worried about random people signing others up for services as pranks or something). They have a web-based form that you can get to after providing their site with enough information to prove that you are who you claim to be, so I went there and filled out their crufty form. Since I otherwise wouldn't have a copy for my archives, I copied and pasted the text in an email to myself before I hit the SEND button on their web page.
I expected to hear nothing for a minimum of 24 hours, but was pleasantly surprised to get a non-form letter response in under five minutes.
Unfortunately, the response was basically, "this is something that can't be handled via web-mail, so you'll either have to use our online chat thing or call us".
Still having flashbacks to the horrid experience of last month's call center clustermess, I opted for their poorly-designed web chat interface.
I'm guessing the first five to seven things the "person" on the other end of the web chat said were actually a robot asking canned questions like "May I call you by your first name?".
When she finally got around to asking questions about what the nature of my problem, I started cutting and pasting paragraphs from the web-mail I had so cleverly kept a copy of.
Oh. Not only had the twit that took last month's call not fixed the problem, but she deducted the disputed amount from what my automatic payment would be. This meant that Charter got less than what they thought they were owed, so there was a balance forward from the previous month's bill.
After a little over an hour, I had finally convinced the web-drone that yes, there was a problem with the bill. She assured me that it would be taken care of. I've already penciled in a date on my appointment calendar a month from today to dispute what will most likely not be resolved.
Oh, and just as she had managed to agree that they had made errors, I noticed a charge for "MoxiMate" on my current bill.
Time for another flashback: I was the second Charter customer ever to have a digital video recorder installed. While it would crash several times per day (requiring a ten-minute reboot before it would be functional again) and despite the fact that programs recorded on it could only be watched on the TV it is hooked up to, I still used it for viewing the programs I had previously relegated to my eight VCRs.
Over the months of trial and error, I learned what basic operations not to attempt on the DVR. It limited its functionality, but caused it to crash far less frequently.
Another limitation of the DVR was that it could only hold about 40 hours of programming (and much less than that if any of the programs are HighDef). As soon as Charter offered a unit with twice the disk space (almost a year later), I snapped it up. The only way to get this added disk space was to sign up for "multi-room service" (one more charge on the bill, woo hoo!) but that's okay, as it would give me a second room as an option for where to watch the crap it had recorded.
One huge downfall of signing up for this service (that they failed to let me know ahead of time) is that they had to swap out my main DVR. This means I had lost all the programs that had been recorded but hadn't been watched. It also meant that I would lose the list of 70 or so programs it had been set up to record on a regular basis. I scribbled down some notes quickly before the tech made the swap.
Unfortunately, the "second room" unit (the aforementioned "MoxiMate") rarely worked (maybe 10% of the time if I was lucky), and it would occasionally cause the main unit to not work (saying that the MoxiMate needed to change channels, so it wouldn't allow the main unit to record things).
I eventually called Charter and told them that the MoxiMate wasn't working. They sent a tech out to swap it with a new unit (which again caused me to lose all unwatched programming it had recorded, plus the list of shows it should record in the future). The tech said that pretty much everyone that had a MoxiMate installed was having the same problems.
Naturally, the new MoxiMate worked about as well as the original one had. After a month, I called Charter Tech Support again. Since this was such a common problem, they suggested I get rid of the MoxiMate. I didn't want to go back to only having half the disk space for recording programs, so they said they would pick up the MoxiMate, but only charge me for DVR service plus multi-room DVR service, but not the third charge for having a MoxiMate box.
When the tech picked up the MoxiMate box, he replaced it with a digital converter box. I kept my service the same for the next year or so. It should be noted that this digital converter box only worked about half the time for the upper-level (100-999) channels.
Then in April of this year, I decided it was stupid to be paying for the additional digital converter box each month when (1) I rarely used the TV it's hooked up to, and (2) the box only worked about half the time.
Okay. Back to the present. :-)
So as I'm still in the brain-dead web chat program (with a tiny fixed-sized window with an annoying loud "click" every ten seconds as it would check for any updates, as opposed to updating whenever either party clicked on "send") I ask the billing support gal how long I've been charged for the MoxiMate hardware that they picked up over a year ago.
As she claimed ignorance, I pulled my file for the last year or so of monthly Charter bills. I'm somewhat relieved to find that the charges for "MoxiMate" only showed up in mid-April, not-so-coincidentally the same day they took the order to pick up the unused Digital Converter.
I point out to the billing gal that I'm being charged for hardware that I don't have. After almost another hour of her trying to get me to call their phone support, and/or downgrade to single-room DVR with half the storage space, she says that customers can't have Multi-Room DVRs without paying an additional charge for a MoxiMate hardware (whether they have it or not).
I ask her if she can set up a work order for a tech to deliver a MoxiMate, which I will probably keep in the original box and store it in a closet, since that will cost me the same (she assured me) as if I didn't have a MoxiMate. She claimed that she is unable to do any service changes via the web-chat, and that I would have to call them. I argued that I wasn't requesting any service changes--just requesting that they deliver the hardware so that my set-up matches what they are currently billing me for.
So after nearly two hours of this exercise in futility, I thank her for her time, and tell her that if I don't see a charge for "Digital Converter" on next month's bill I'll be pleasantly surprised.
She asks if there's anything else she can help me with. I reply with "Apparently not. *sigh*" and she disconnects (causing the chat window to go blank so I won't be able to cut and paste the conversation here).
I won't be switching back to one of the mini-dish systems (their shortcomings will be the subject of another lengthy upcoming blog), and I won't be switching my cable internet to DSL (yet another future blog), but one more billing error on the part of Charter Communication is going to make me seriously think about switching back to a dial-up ISP, VCRs, and just the local channels. The main things I'd miss would be South Park (which I could get on DVD later), WWE Raw (which is barely worth watching on fast-forward), and Battlestar Galactica (which only has 22 episodes left). Oh, and Shin Chan, which I could probably find on YouTube.
And Charter wonders why I keep telling them "no" when they continuously attempt to convince me to switch my land-line phone to CharterPhone.
Until next time, this has been OttoBlog.
Copyright © 1994-2015 Otto E Heuer. All rights reserved.