October 08, 2005

Longview Cable

Longview Cable sucks... a lot. You should never get it if you have a choice, and if you already have it, you should get your cable and internet from somebody else. Here is what happened to me: it could happen to you.

Last month, due to an effort to reduce the number of bills being paid out (and the exponentially high risk of accidentally forgetting to send one out), we got direct bill to credit card set up on at least half of our bills: LCTV and CableLynx included. Yes, Cable and Internet are two separate bills, for no reason that anyone can figure, but we had them both billing to the credit card.

Then, because my wife is good like that, she called Longview Cable to verify that the charges were going to be processed on the credit card and life would be good, and she was assured that there would be no problems. This was the 28th of September. Then, on Thursday, October 6, our cable internet went down. Those of you who have LCTV and CableLynx know this isn't very rare, so I called tech support and found myself waiting in a line of 8 people... and after 20 minutes, I deteremined that there must be only 1 tech answering calls. Thus, I used a nifty feature and left a call-back number so that I would hear from them that evening or the next day.

Friday morning I checked my messages (none) and then went off to work, expecting a call. Work was busy and the cares of home slipped my mind, until I returned home to no internet. Pissed off that I had gotten no call, I called up tech support and managed to wait out the line and get through. I was pleasantly suprised to find a competent tech who checked the server I was working through and then paused to check my account, in the space of 2 or 3 minutes. He informed me that my account was on hold and gave me the information to call LCTV about it. Calling LCTV yielded me the information that the accounts people were gone for the day (apparently they leave at 5) and the informative young lad promised to leave them with my number.

Saturday (today), I awoke around 10.30 to no call and no message. Beginning to suspect this was typical of LCTV/CableLynx, I called them. The lady at the other end of the line seemed to be a tad inept... as it took her about 5 minutes to pull up my account. After we got through that, it took her another 5 or so to figure out why it had been disconnected. Once we'd gotten through all of that, she told me that they had already billed me and had somehow disconnected my internet anyways and that she was fixing it. Following this was a rather irritating set of restarting the cable modem 3 times followed by her calling tech support, another restart and renewing my IP a couple times before I finally got internet back. She promised that her boss would call me so we could discuss the wretched service I've gotten from LCTV/CableLynx... but I'm not holding my breath. Looks like I might be calling or visiting on Monday.

Posted by Vengeful Cynic at October 8, 2005 12:06 PM | TrackBack