So, for the past few days I’ve been fighting with my cable company. Since around Sunday my 5mbps internet connection has dwindled down to a measly 600kbps. For all our non-techies out there, that’s about 12% of its regular speed. Needless to say, I can’t play Halo or download anything. I’ve basically regressed to dial-up, and it’s driving me crazy. Since I work during the day, I’ve had to rely on Charter’s online technical support chat, which has been less than helpful. I hate contacting technical support for anything computer related. I wish that there was some kind of badge, or code, or something of that nature that I could give to signify that I’m an IT Administrator. That way, I wouldn’t have to answer all the really stupid questions.

Sunday, after realizing I couldn’t play Halo, I got into the online chat room and waited for a representative to answer my question. When the tech guy arrived, he asked the basic questions: What’s your account number? Have you tried restarting your modem? etc. After we established that I had already done these things, he asked if I was connected through a router. I replied that I was and he asked if I would try connecting directly through the modem. Now, I wasn’t trying to be a real smart alack, but we were chatting online. I reminded him that my internet connection was currently facilitating this very enlightening conversation and that if I were to disconnect from my router, I would have to spend the next 30 minutes of my life explaining to another rep. exactly what was going on. His response? Yes, I apologize for the inconvenience. Seriously? You can’t take my name or account # or something so that I don’t have to explain the situation again? No, their online technical support has no way of doing such a thing. I was so disgusted that I just gave up. Three days later, I’m still getting the run-around about my service.

Last night, after deciding that I was going to attempt a switch to DSL, I began to wonder: why is my cable company’s customer service so bad? Well, they’re a state-sponsored monopoly. No other cable companies can come into this area and offer any kind of competing service. If you have the cable market cornered, why worry about good customer relations? If you want cable, you’ll buy their product, no matter how crappy it is. Here are some attitudes monopolies have towards their customers:

  • Arrogant - Sooner or later, you’ll need our product.
  • Apathetic - We’re offering a service, what more do you want?
  • Oblivious - We know what our customers want.
  • Unfocused - We do Internet, Television, and Telephone!

When you look at the state of “the Church” today, it makes you wonder if we Christians have done the same thing. We’ll talk about that some more tomorrow in part two.