Regarding Steve Grace's aggravating experience dealing with Time Warner...

 It’s nice to see Steve Grace speak so eloquently about the local Time Warner cable situation. Ditto.

I’ve had the same things happen to me. I won’t repeat the aggravation over the loss of my Internet connection – because this truly happens regularly. I rely on only TW (formerly Comcast) service for Internet, and have DirecTV for television.

My problems began this past summer when I switched from my Earthlink DSL service because of issues with that technology (I won’t bore you with the details, but LAT dropped the ball on this mess as well). I decided to get Internet cable service through my local cable provider in Claremont. As part of setting up my Internet service with Comcast, a technician was sent to my home to hook up the cable. I had my own contractor hook up the wire from inside my house to a socket on the outside of the home about a year earlier. That’s all the Comcast techie had to do was plug it in. That sounds simple, right?

Nope. My Comcast guy (recall the YouTube video techie who fell asleep on a prospective customer’s couch?) ended up crawling around in my attic searching for a link because he said my outside connection didn’t work. He eventually drilled a hole into the side of my house, shorted out the electricity when he bored into a live wire. He left frustrated two hours later, and he played around with my computer setup along the way. But before he left he ran a cable through my side door of the house, laid it across the floor, and eventually plugged it into my modem.

It actually worked.

When I arrived home to relieve my wife of these headaches, I plugged the cable into my outside socket just to see if it got me on the Web. It worked!

But I still had a hole in the side of my house and half a house without electricity. So I threatened Comcast with their collective lives, called the Attorney General’s Office in Sacramento to pick up a consumer complaint form, called my local government to complain about the franchise mess up, and was about to call the FCC when Comcast’s insurance agent gave me a ring.

Since I had already gotten an estimate for the repairs, the agent was elated. She said fax the estimate to her, and she’d get a check out in the mail as soon as possible. And they didn’t even bother to send anyone out to check out the situation. Trusting souls!

But the wonderful saga doesn’t end here.

With the switchover to TW from Comcast, all of us Comcast customers were sent an email telling us how to migrate our email accounts over to TW’s Roadrunner system. Needless to say, the switchover didn’t work. Emails were sent out a day later telling us to hold off on switching over to the TW email accounts for another day or two.

Well too late for me. My system was officially screwed up.

Everything since is far easier to describe. It’s very much like Steve Grace explains: Outages, calls to TW service folks, getting hung up on as you wait 20-30 minutes for a recording that instructs you to call back later, denials that there is anything wrong with the system. Hmmmm. Let’s see here, I’m highly educated with 17 years of education under my belt. I bet Grace has just as much education.

But I bet most of the folks who work in the service field of TW don’t even have GEDs (See above) As for the Los Angeles Times, I’m baffled by its single story on the subject – granted, it was a front page story – but it hasn’t kept up the steady drum beat. What’s up with the LAT anyway? This would seem to be one of the biggest consumer stories of the year and the LAT is asleep on a couch.

Pat Maio