As I write this article, my head is threatening to blow up
and scatter brain matter all over the place. Gross? Yes, but that’s what
happens when you’re angry and have no outlet for the anger.  This is what happens when you deal with the
cable company.

I recently moved into a new house. With a move comes the
requisite red tape—doing an address change with the PO, canceling your old
utilities and starting new ones—but nothing prepares you for the special hell
of dealing with the cable company. Or at least the one I was dealing with.

I’ll spare you the goriest details but the process of
getting cable installed in the new place involved being on hold for a total of five
hours (including waiting in a chat room for a customer rep), cable being strung
incorrectly around the perimeter of my house and not buried (the techs never
came back), the final installation not even being what I’d ordered, etc.

Basically, if this cable company were a person, I’d punch it
right in the stomach. Since it’s not, I will share my displeasure through
social media, where I will name names and warn everyone I know to stay away
from the place.

So my question is why a company would have an average hold
time of 45 minutes for any call—whether it’s someone ordering or someone
complaining about a service. Is it a matter of cheapness, just an unwillingness
to hire enough people to deal effectively with clientele? Or did this cable
company just happen to find all of its employees from a low IQ pool?

And why doesn’t this company have some kind of quality
control measures in place for their installer contractors? Is the long hold
time a way to make sure they never hear any complaints?

It’s unexplainable and unacceptable. The only experience I
have had that’s even come close to is the wait lines at my cell phone service
provider. (Is it me, or do those reps stare at their screens an inordinately
long period of time when setting anything up?)

I don’t care if you offer your end-users computing speed
that is so fast it’s almost time travel, if you can’t work with the customer in
a satisfactory manner, then you are losing more than you think. Once your company
gets a bad reputation, it’s very, very hard to undo it.