Ah, the power of calling back multiple times...

So I wrote earlier about how a garbage truck took down the cable lines that run from the telephone pole to the outside of my apartment building. I have cable internet at home so this was doubly bad. The lines went down on Monday morning and by Tuesday afternoon somebody had finally come round to put them back up. Unfortunately they didn't seem to check that the service was actually working, so my apartment (and everybody else in the complex, it seems) is still without cable. Boyfriend called Time Warner a couple of times and the people really talked down to him and were rude. This was probably not helped by him getting angry at them, and them getting angry at him, and so basically they didn't feel they needed to help him, and told him (on Tuesday) that someone might come out on Friday.

Boyfriend wrote down his account number for me and asked them to call, since at this point he would just get angry at them again. So I called and used my sugary survey-administering voice (a previous college job) and the lady bumped it up to Thursday morning, plus the guy would check with us that the service was working. Boyfriend did get Time Warner to agree to comp the bill for the missed days.. I was thinking of asking for more free time if they couldn't bump up the repair schedule, but I didn't want to push it. The lady was very nice and the entire call took about seven minutes, including navigating all the menus. She put me on hold several times so she might have been checking with a manager or something. Oddly enough, several weeks ago Time Warner sent Boyfriend a package of coupons and things to apologize for some poor service.. apparently there had been problems elsewhere in the city but not in our area, but they sent them to everybody. Now that we are actually having problems, I doubt they will do the same just for us. It seems easier for a company to build up goodwill by sending customers who have had no problems some free stuff, than to try to placate angry customers.

From this experience, it seems the magic words are, "and everybody else in the complex has no cable too." We are all tethered to that little line coming from the telephone pole. Actually, the way we found that nobody else seems to have internet, since we rarely talk to our neighbors, is that when Boyfriend's computer scanned for wireless access points, none were online. But we know from previous experience that at least five of our neighbors also have a wireless router (as do we, to avoid running cables between rooms) so the network silence was a bit odd. I wonder if anybody else has called.. I know our landlord knows about it and he may have called, but I guess the reports of our neighbors wouldn't show up when they pull up our account.