Time Warner, You Suck

Yep, that's pretty much where I'm at right now.

Eloquent? No. True? Yes.

In order to explain my full vexation, we'll have to rewind a bit. A few months back, okay, several because it was back around the wedding last year, Time Warner (TW) switched their DVR programming providers (I don't know that this is the correct term, nor do I claim to know what the correct term is, this is just what I'm calling it) from a third-party company to a new in-house design. At least from what I understand. What this meant to me as a customer is I got a crappier service for the same high monthly fee.

Oh heck naw, this wasn't going to fly.

So, I had Mark call (cable is in his name, we weren't married at the time) and I prodded him to pressure them into lowering our monthly bill due to this inconvenience. After a half-hour or so of switching from customer service rep to supervisor, to another supervisor, he accomplished this and got enough knocked off our monthly bill for us to deal with the unwelcome changes. To be honest, there really aren't a lot of options in our area - especially cheap ones - so we definitely had to at least TRY to deal with it.

Since that time we've had a lot of issues. Again, we shouldn't have to deal with any problems because we pay quite a premium to them, which makes me even more angry about the situation. We always have trouble with series records, shows taping correctly, shows playing correctly after they've been taped, etc.

It all came to a head Saturday morning. We turned the TV on and were trying to watch a program we had DVR'd. It said that it had taped, but we didn't have access to it. We tried other programs and got the same message. A few minutes later, there was a big pop as the TV and DVR shut off for an "update". This has also randomly been happening since the switch over. So, we wait... and we wait... and we wait. Mark goes out to mow the grass and I get into a book and 3+ hours later the DVR is still "updating". Not okay.

So, Mark calls TW to tell them what's going on. The outcome of the convo was that the best they could do for us was send out a repairperson on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday. Can we just trade in the DVR box? No. They will do that if need be after they've inspected things on Tuesday.

Mark gets off the phone with TW and relays this info to me and I proceed to rant and rave about our craptastic experience lately with TW. Then, I decide, I'm looking up another cable provider and I'm switching. Right. Now.

I look up pricing, Mark's on board, we make the call, and they were able to send someone out Sunday to hook us up. AND (also by my direction ; ) ) we are saving about $10 per month with the new provider. Mark's turning into my own little bargain shopper-in-training!

We're now set up with another company, Mark is (supposed to be) happily cancelling with TW today and I can feel better about the fact that we are saving $120 a year, plus stress because I'll no longer have to rant about the terrible service we were getting with TW. The bad part about it is that we have officially lost 6 weeks of programming that was saved on our DVR (although, I doubt we would have gotten it back even if we stayed with them) since we were behind on nearly every show we watch. Guess we'll have to catch up when they show re-runs during the Summer months. I also fully blame this situation on TW.