CableOne is Number Two

And by Number Two, let me be clear that I am referring to feces. A giant, stinking mound of it, overripe in the late-August sun, stretching from here to infinity and reaching higher than the eye can see. It can be smelled up to three states away when the wind is blowing just right…

When we learned we were moving to Boise, I called up the schmucks at Comcast. They asked me what our new address would be, entered it into their computer and informed me that I could not stay with Comcast as a local company named CableOne had dibs on that address. I would have to migrate over.

Well, I was migrating everything else at the time, my email address would just be one. More. Thing.

Then the day came when the CableOne installer was due to come by and hook us up. He showed up within his window of opportunity (8-noon) and proceeded to tell us, straightaway, that he was strictly an install guy. If we had any questions beyond wiring and the few simple human interactions he had been trained to perform, we would have to call the home office and speak to a tech.

I think I knew right then, in my gut, what a horrible mistake I had made. The DTV guys had just been out and had not only performed the physical install of the dish and the wiring, but stuck around long enough to make sure that their equipment worked and that all our other entertainment peripherals were properly connected to the new gizmo.

CableOne, on the other hand, said “I will be hooking up a gizmo, then fleeing before you have a chance to pepper me with inane questions regarding its actual operation.”

Fortunately, my wife is kind of a communications technology genius and we were able to hop on board the information superhighway pretty easily, in spite of CableOne’s policy of indifference to customer service.

Well, it’s five weeks later and we’ve had four major, extended outages, most occurring on the weekends. If you call early enough in the outage you can get through to customer support on the phone, then be forced to wait fifteen minutes on hold to finally be told that they are aware of the problem, are working on it, and have absolutely no clue what time the issue will be resolved, thank you for calling. If you call too late, all you get is a busy signal.

And the bitch about being in an outage—whether it’s internet or a power outage—is you never know how long it’s going to last. You can look back at it and say, “Well, it was 12 fucking hours, but it was on a weekend…” But when you’re in the middle of it, you have no idea how long the misery is going to spread out ahead of you.

Murphy was an optimist, but I always assume the worst immediately until proved wrong. It’s just my sunny outlook, I guess. And the fact that I had an important freelance job that was supposed to be uploaded today, and the fact that I had to retrieve my email over fries and a Coke at Carl’s Jr., and I hate Coke almost as much as CableOne…

Just as suddenly as our connection to the internet had been snatched away from us, it was returned about 10 o’clock tonight. Without so much as a reach-around or a “sorry for the inconvenience.” And I’m willing to bet our account will not be credited for the half-day this weekend that it was inactive, no matter how many times we call nor how long we sit on hold, waiting to be told to go fuck ourselves and call back later when the line will be jammed.

I am definitely calling the local competition, Qwest, in the morning to feel them out as to whether or not they can even do anything at this address (I don’t understand monopolies, but I think T.R. had the right idea about them). If Qwest is permitted to do business at our address, we might well make the jump to devil we don’t know. Because the devil we do know has turned out to be a real son of a bitch.