Time Warner Cable: Dead To Me

Posted by Kyle April 20th, 2007 at 05:43pm In General

Now, eagle-eyed members of the Colbert Nation know that this is in fact an outdated version of the “On Notice” board, but this will have to do. For the purposes of this rant, we’ll call this the “Dead to Me” board. That’s right Time Warner Cable, you are dead to me.

Oh sure, you’ve provided analog cable channels with little to no trouble since I moved into my apartment 3 years ago, but I don’t want just any old cable. I want the cable I pay exorbitant monthly fees for. First there was Turner Classic Movies. We don’t talk much about TCM here on the ‘Faux because it’s a movie channel, but goddamn do I love me the TCM. And what did TWC think of TCM? TWC couldn’t care less about it! It’s among the weakest signals in the lineup (along with MTV2 and Noggin). I never found out what happened at the end of She Done Him Wrong, and I missed dozens of great movies because the channel was unavailable.

Well Nation, what do you think I did? I called Time Warner Cable and asked them to fix the problem. They sent people out to check the lines, fiddled around a little, and told me it would get better. It was something I’d just have to live with. This was after I had already ditched the spotty Roadrunner Internet service for the rock-solid Verizon DSL.

But in February I bought a lovely HD plasma screen, with the express intention of watching high definition television. I am, after all, a sometime contributor to a television blog. And cable is the best way I know of to get HD content without paying an arm and a leg. Just an arm will do for TWC. Well, what do we discover upon plugging in the fancy new Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DVR? We don’t get ABC HD, FOX, HD, CW HD, or NBC HD. We get a gray screen. For some reason we get CBS HD with no trouble whatsoever, which is great for the 30 minutes of CBS programming we watch in a week.

7 weeks and 5 technician visits later, we’re in the same situation. The last guy told us we needed to have cable rerun from our neighbor’s house 2 doors down and he’d make sure there was a crack team of contractors sent out right away. So we actually got the keys from them and I waited around all day. You know what I got? One technician, who had no idea what I was talking about, and refused to take the fire escape to get into our backyard. He left, claiming that his supervisor would call me. I don’t believe these people even have supervisors. There has been absolutely no continuity between visits. They start over from scratch every time, assuming I don’t know what I’m talking about and re-doing all the things the last guy did.

I’m considering switching to satellite, since then I wouldn’t have to coordinate with my downstairs and 2-doors-down neighbors every time I need someone to run a wire. But for some reason none of the big guys have CW or PBS HD. I suppose that won’t be much of a problem if VM and Gilmore Girls get canceled. But I don’t want to end up like my mother who doesn’t get local channels when there are leaves on the trees. Do we have any NYC readers with HD satellite experience out there? I am going out of my mind.