Time Warner Cable's tiered levels of incompetence

For those who haven't heard of Time Warner Cable's new tiered billing for Internet services, and if you're not angry about it then you just haven't heard yet, visit any of these sites:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090331_726397.htm
http://droptimewarnercable.com/
http://stoptwc.info/
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Cable-Expands-Metered-Billing-101655
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/get-ready-for-metered-broadband-texas.ars
PC Magazine - Time Warner Cable: Use More, Pay More – Accept It

Basically, Time Warner has been testing a program in Beaumont, Texas where customers pay for a certain level of service--four levels starting with Lite at $29.95, with a cap of 5 gigabytes, and ending with Turbo at $54, with a 40 gigabytes cap--and will pay about a dollar per gigabyte over your previously nonexistent limit. In August it will begin another test program in four cities across the U.S., and Greensboro is one of them.

Or, a more brief summary, Time Warner wants to charge you more money for providing less service.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Time Warner trying to get some basic information on this program. It seems that bandwidth isn't the only services they're decreasing.

Person #1 - I was transferred incorrectly to sales because voice recognition technology doesn't work. I asked to be transferred to the correct person.

Person #2 - Agent does not understand the tiered system and seems to be nervous that I asked. She says she can't access any information that I want (how much bandwidth I use per month, specifically when the new pricing system goes into effect, etc.), and instead says she has to transfer me to an "Account Specialist." I assume this position involves some sort of extra training and special knowledge.

Person #3 - I am wrong. The Account Specialist does not understand the tiered system, is not aware of the bandwidth limit (40 gigabytes), and says that she doesn't know where I got my information but there is a page on the Time Warner Cable website that will tell me everything I need to know. I read her direct quotes from Time Warner Cable media reps and the company CEO from the Charlotte News & Observer. She begins to stutter, literally stutter, as I ask her for the link to the page she mentioned which apparently has the "correct" information that will contradict the news reports. She sends me to www.timewarnercable.com. I tell her I'm already on that page, which is how I found the customer service number, and ask her to give me the specific page. She admits she doesn't know how to find the page and has clearly not actually read the page, so she puts me on hold.

After a 10-plus minute wait she comes on the line and tells me that the Road Runner website, not the Time Warner Cable website she sent me to specifically, has a News 14 news clip about the new program. I ask her if watching video while trying to understand why Time Warner is screwing over its customers counts toward the total bandwidth. She says she doesn't know.

I tell her that I've already seen the clip, adding further that if the clip had answered my questions then I wouldn't be on the phone with her. In retrospect, I should have brought up that telling me an unbiased, outside news source that she hasn't even seen is wrong and referring me to a report from "Time Warner Cable's exclusive, 24-hour local news network" as proof of this fact, a report she also has not seen, is insulting to my intelligence, but I digress. She assures me that Time Warner Cable will contact us by mail and email with all the information we need when the program goes into effect in August. I tell her that I will be switching to DSL within the week and ask to be transferred to someone who can disconnect my service or can give me reason to keep doing business with Time Warner between now and August in the form of a huge discount.

Person #4 - She transferred me to sales. As someone who used to answer phones for Time Warner Customer Retention, I know that the sales department can only sign you up for new services, not give you a discount on existing services or disconnect your service. After I explain my previous conversation, the agents informs me of this as well. I ask to be transferred to the correct department, but before I'm transferred over the agent makes the comment that the previous agent must have given me some bad information because my clear anger over the program doesn't seem to be based on what the program actually is.

I'm very confused by this, and hoping that she has some information that I do not I ask her what she means. She explains that very few people "abuse their Internet connection" in a way that would get over the 40 gb a month limit, and that you would basically have to, and I swear this is a direct quote, "be pirating movies and selling them at flea markets" to go over 40 gb a month. I cut her off mid-sentence and, in summary, tell her that this is an absolutely insulting and incredibly ignorant statement, that I can not believe someone working for an Internet provider could know so little about modern Internet services and would go so far as to accuse someone concerned about the plan of being a criminal, and then explain a couple points about the actual bandwidth required for streaming video or operate current console online gaming, and mention the Bernstein company's study that says streaming 7.25 hours a week of video a week on her company's new plan could result in over $200 of extra charges (for comparison, the average American family watches more than 60 hours of TV a week), before asking to be transferred to the correct agent without her speaking one more single word to me.

(For reference, this was Nicole at a call center based in Charlotte, she said.)

Person #5 - I threaten to switch to DSL and he discounts my service. In his defense, this agent was very nice, as most Customer Retention agents are trained to be. I get off the phone at 59 minutes and 35 seconds.

I'm moving out of my apartment around July and probably leaving Greensboro, so for me this is not a financial issue. It's purely principle. (In all honesty, getting discounts by threatening to go to another provider has been what I've done ever six months to a year since working for Time Warner and realizing this was all you have to do to get a lower rate.)

We have to let the company know that this program is unacceptable. Were the decision simply up to me, I would have shut off my service on the spot. I have two roommates, one who will be in the house much longer than the other two of us, so it's not solely my decision.

You don't have to actually cancel service to let the company know you disapprove (just like you don't have to actually cancel service to get a lower rate, just call them and say you'll disconnect if you don't get one), just email them at realideas@twcable.com or call at 866-874-2389 and tell them you're going to cancel in August when the program kicks in. Enough negative feedback and Time Warner will kill this idiotic program. Take a few minutes, send an email, and get our service back.

Dear Mrs. Nathan's Mom

Dear Mrs. Nathan's Mom,

I have to start by thanking you for posting a comment on my blog. I've been a little out of practice with this thing, and haven't posted in it since March. Your comment reminded me this blog existed, and I'll be updating it more regularly in the future.

I notice in your comment that you don't offer any arguments for the safety of giving a blind kid a gun; you actually create a pretty decent argument for your son to never, ever be handed a loaded firearm. First, let's clear up a few things.

1) Your son does not have super-sensitive hearing: This is a myth. Your son pays more attention to his hearing no doubt, since his vision isn't up to par, but his ears operate exactly like yours and everyone else's.

And what's your real argument there? That your son can hear where a deer is accurately enough to tag its kill zone from 100 yards away? He might enjoy reading the Braille version of Daredevil comics, but those human echolocation powers are still fictional, ma'am. Although, I have to admit I would read a comic called "Daredevil: The Man Without Fear (of Innocent Bystanders)."

(By the way, your son scoring well on his hunter safety written test doesn't really have anything to do with his vision, does it? I've taken that course as well.)

2) Legally blind is still blind: For the purposes of this conversation, anyway. The American definition of legally blind is at least 20/200 vision in the best eye with the best correction. That literally means the deer I can pick out at 200 feet would have to be six strides from your son before it was that visible. In case you've never been hunting, deer don't get that close.

Your son isn't allowed to drive a car. He can't read his rifle's safety manual. Why should he operate a firearm? How can he possibly safely do so? And I'm guessing his gangbanging career is just shot, so to speak.

3) Your blind son is not a sharpshooter: I used to live near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which houses one of the two sniper schools used by the Marine Corps. Let's say the military ignored its rule about not accepting the legally blind (something to do with them not being able to safely operate firearms, grenades, artillery, Humvees, maps, etc.) and let him go toe-to-toe with actual sharpshooters. His legally nonexistent oculars are going to serve him better than the 20/20+ military-trained eyes of actual snipers?

At what point did you slip into the delusion that your son is a superhero? I'll tell you what, the day your son fights off a group of burglars or saves an infant from the burning building that not even firefighters can get to--firefighters with properly operating eyeballs mind you--then I will personally buy him a rifle. No bullets, though. I figure by the time he navigates his way to the store I can get myself safely out of range, out of state, or do whatever I need to do to get away from a walking definition of the phrase "firing blind."

Mrs. Nathan's Mom, if you're going to go around Googling your son's name and reading random blogs then you've got to expect to find some that disagree with you. You've also got to expect some of those people to be assholes about it. (If you didn't expect that, then I'd like to formally welcome you to the Internet. Wikipedia is useful, and Yahoo Mail is the best.) I considered post-scripting the above with a list of things that I was better at than your son (e.g. dodgeball, darts, reading, checking the expiration date on milk, etc.) but they all seemed pretty obvious. Obvious to everyone but you, of course.

And finally, just so you know, finding things I don't like and then writing about them is actually my chosen career, so this attitude has already and will continue to take me far. I don't really foresee myself taking a hard fall. Mostly because I can see where all my furniture is.

Cheers,
Luke

Failure to Communicate: Re-elections can't come early enough for SGA

As a preface, here's this week's front page story from The Carolinian.

In February of 2007 when the UNCG Student Government Association was placed on probation, it was because the SGA failed to give the university 12 hours notice before holding an event on campus. It was a small rule broken, essentially a technicality.

In March of 2008 our SGA was placed on probation again, for what we again can essentially call a technicality. The SGA recently lost its affiliation with the university for about a week and a half when SGA President John Bryant was supposed to submit some paperwork, but apparently did not. Its current probationary status is the result of Bryant's error.

These errors might seem small when taken at face value, but they reflect a huge failure of our SGA to fulfill one of its major purposes. To many students, SGA is known mostly as the governing body they have to deal with in order for their student group to gain and maintain affiliation with the university or receive any of the funds allotted to student groups. Without filling out the correct forms and taking the technical, SGA-approved steps toward affiliation, you're not getting a dime.

I know plenty of people who have failed at this task, frustrated, because they simply forgot a form or turned something in too late. But them's the breaks. You don't go through the motions, you don't get your moolah.

So, the mere fact that these violations happened in the governing body charged with deciding if all other student groups can receive or maintain affiliation with the university begs the question, why are people who can't follow the rules in charge of enforcing the rules?

Full column

La Oficina

Variety -- BBC Worldwide Americas has licensed "The Office" for a local remake in Chile.

It's the first format deal in Latin America for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's comedy and the first Spanish-language version.

"We stopped making 'The Office' in 2003, but the rest of the world didn't," Gervais said. "I won't be happy until I see an Inuit doing the dance."

Yet another point for me to turn to when arguing that The Office is the best television show that has ever existed. The Chilean version will be the sixth version of the show, the others hailing from France, America, Germany, French Canada, and the original U.K. show.

This reminded me of the surprising amount of Smurfs exposure there has been in the world, a fact NPR educated me on earlier this week. The show has been put in so many other countries that it has basically been translated into more languages than it hasn't. Not bad for a communist conspiracy.

Full Variety article

Word, son

An english professor played this for us in class once. I'm gonna miss the English department at UNCG.

Rock on with your historic self

For various reasons, I've spent the past couple days looking through remixes of MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech." And, for various reasons, I've decided this is the best one I've seen.

Financial lemming

Someone I know asked me a while back what I would do if money wasn't a factor, the famous Office Space question. The fact that I'd still write tells me I'm in the right career track, but I would probably get rid of the things I don't like, such as getting up early, doing work I don't want to do, and wearing pants. I'd probably just blog.

When I heard of Smorty, a site that basically pays to advertise on blogs by paying you for blogging whatever opinion you have on topics they come up with, I figured it was B.S. Then a couple of my friends gave it a shot, and Joe said he made 50 bucks in a week, and I decided it was time to go with the crowd.

Obviously I wouldn't be doing this if the site tried to control what I write in any way. Get paid to blog, write what I want, doesn't seem like a bad deal. The only catch is I can't label which post is from Smorty. So, fair warning, some of the unbiased entries to follow may or may not be making me small amounts of money.

Romney wins!!!!11!11!666!!!!

Did the people of Michigan vote for the most evil looking person, or do republicans just look evil when they're happy? Maybe Michiganders love Mormons.

Yes, the correct term is Michigander.