Time Warner Sucks!

No, the title is not meant to be facetious. It's the truth.

I had hinted about how much I hated Time Warner in an earlier blog entry, but I never did go into any detail about what happened. And then, the sh!t hit the fan today. But before I get into what happened today, let me discuss what happened on April 3rd. I promise you, this will be relevant to my story today.

(Sorry for the really long rant!)

(Background: A few months ago, my cable bill was a tad under $50/month for cable, Road Runner Basic high speed internet service (HSI), and a digital box rental. Recently, I've added HBO to my contract at $15/month, pushing my total bill to about $60-65/month. My basic cable is free of charge; it's paid for by my landlord as part of his HOA dues).

I had acquired a Motorola SURFBoard cable modem to replace my POS RCA modem that Time Warner gave me. I called in to TW HSI support to get the new modem provisioned. The idiot rep, for the life of her, could not get my modem working. At the end of the call, she told me that my old modem would work just fine.

(FYI, in order to "provision" a new modem, a HSI company needs the MAC address of your modem--a 12 hexadecimal key. You give them the key, they punch it in their computer, and the change is usually quick.)

I asked her, "Wait a second. How would my old modem still work? Didn't you punch in the new MAC address?"

Her response? Something like "It should work just fine." Of course, it did, leading me to believe that she never correctly provisioned my modem.

Later in the day, I had another rep provision my modem, and he was able to do it within minutes. I thought I was in the clear, until I noticed that my speeds are pathetically slow. I called TW again the next day, and the rep insisted that slow speeds were perfectly acceptable (I was getting about 1 Mbps, when Road Runner Basic advertises 4-5Mbps). Eventually, the tech found out that one of the earlier techs had provisioned my modem for the Road Runner Lite plan (RR's low-end plan, providing 1.5Mbps down)! He quickly corrected this, and I had my higher speeds again!

Fast forward to today: I checked my Citibank credit card statement earlier today, only to see an ~$90 charge on it from TW! I understand that companies need to raise their rates every now and then, but a $25 increase in a month???

I checked my TW statement, and spotted a couple extra charges to my bill: a charge of ~$16 for Broadcast Basic (what I'm supposed to get for free, or so I thought), and a "partial month" charge for $5.66. There was also a credit for a cool $0.24!

Mildly ticked off, I called Customer Service and spoke to an individual who insisted that the charges were all correct. When I inquired about the "partial charges," the rep told me that these partial charges stemmed from a subscription to Road Runner Lite (remember that I was put on the Lite plan for one day). Never mind the fact that I was still being billed for Road Runner Basic--TW's standard HSI service. I explained that there is clearly a problem here. The rep's reply? Something to the effect of "oh, yeah, the system can add those [charges] at any time." You could imagine how happy I was to hear that TW could charge me at random at any time.

Totally livid, I threatened to cancel all my services. The rep coldly told me "ok." On top of that, he mentioned that there is a $1.99 convenience (read: bullsh!t) fee for each service removed from my's contract! At that point, I asked him if he really wanted to lose a customer. He replied with "go ahead." I had him remove HBO from my plan, and incurred the $1.99 charge.

Before I hung up on the guy, I asked him if I was going to be charged $1.99 for this call. In all seriousness, he answered "no, sir, we will never charge you for a phone call." I told him "you guys probably will next month" and hung up before he could get into his "thank you for letting us rip you off...have a nice day" spiel. I fired off a nasty email to TW's email support, and have yet to hear a reply.

(Yeah, I know, I can act quite childish at times).

After an hour of cooling off, I decided to call TW again. I got a really nice guy, who looked at the partial charges and thought I was getting screwed himself (insert big grin here). He forwarded me to another department, and I finally got resolution.

The rep agreed with me that I shouldn't have been doubly charged for the RR Basic + Lite plan, so I got a few cents refunded to my account. I then inquired about the rest of the partial charges, as well as the Broadcast Basic charge of ~$16. The rep put me on hold for a bit, and came back with good news. Apparently, when I was bumped down to Road Runner Lite, that triggered a charge for Broadcast Basic service. It seems that I am supposed to get "sub-Basic" cable service free of charge, which is identical to Broadcast Basic except for the price (~$16, compared to $0). It turns out, that charge + the partial month for Road Runner Lite, added up to $5.66.

The rep credited me for the partial month of Broadcast Basic that I never subscribed for, as well as the $16 I was billed for Broadcast Basic this month. I asked to have HBO re-added on my account, and he did that, but he wouldn't remove the $1.99 convenience charge. That was ok, though; somehow, he ended up lowering my total bill by $5/month as well!

I can't wait to get next month's statement, to see even more bogus charges on my account.

Moral of the story: apparently, I gotta speak to Time Warner twice to get a desired result.