The Show That Never Ends Is Risen From the Grave

Back in February, you may recall, I spent several days without cable television or internet as the folks at Cable One got around to fixing their equipment and providing the service for which I pay them money.

This evening, I returned home and was greeted with a non-working modem and television signal. I dutifully called the customer service number, followed the automated instructions and pressed enough numbers to dial several other countries, plugged and unplugged things and finally caused the poor little auto-troubleshooter to throw up its digital hands and connect me with a person. At his direction, I unplugged and plugged all of the things I had already plugged and unplugged and waited on the phone while he talked to a "senior technician" to schedule a service call.

He came back on the line, told me he would set up the call and tried to sell me on the service plan which would prevent the $45 charge for a service call if the problem happened to be in something other than Cable One's equipment. Since the modem and the cable box are Cable One's equipment, and since I could not come up with the words to properly respond to someone who throws a sales pitch to me when I am calling about an interruption in the service I am already paying for, I said every curse word under the sun in every language known to mankind and some which have been lost, only I speeded it up so that it sounded like, "No, thank you."

The technician, he said, would be out that evening, before 9 PM. At 8 PM, I received the "he's on his way call," saying that the technician would be there within the hour -- by, in fact, 9 PM. He arrived at 8:15, and asked me to come outside to see where my house line hooked into the Cable One network, as he could not find it. I did not know, strangely enough, as I had not examined my property when moving here to locate all of the ground exits and entrances of my utility services. I had presumed it to be a bad idea to try to work on them myself and so I didn't bother. I said that I had a service call a few months ago and it might be in some kind of record that Cable One could have kept on that call. I told him that when the technician had worked on my line in February, he had told me he would lay a temporary line which a crew would later come and bury, so I did not know that the above-ground line would be working in any event.

Foolish me! I had presumed that in the intervening time, this burying event had come to pass, but it had not. In fact, my service was interrupted when someone mowing the school yard next door, across which the four-months-and-counting temporary line passed, had cut it.

I was assured that the crew, which has the responsibility of working for Cable One "across all of southern Oklahoma and Northeast Texas" and is the only crew doing this work, acccording to my technician, would be out next week to bury the line. For reals this time.

Cable One: We'll fix the service for which you pay when we're darn good and ready and not a moment later! Maybe!