This past Monday night I was watching Sundance Channel‘s new show Rectify, about a guy who spent 19 years on death row in a Georgia prison before recent DNA evidence overturns the verdict and he’s released back into society.
The show has been pretty good so far, but for the last 15 minutes of the last episode I found it a little hard to follow.
It’s not that the plot was hard to follow. It was for those last 15 minutes of the show, instead of a picture, I only saw a black screen with a simple message from Time Warner Cable in white font: “Please wait…”
I still had full audio, but it’s a little distracting when you’re told to “Please wait…” for your $70/month cable provider (not including internet) to show a picture to appear on your TV screen. The ellipsis–those three little passive aggressive dots–are particularly obnoxious; they’re Time Warner Cable’s way of letting me know that it’s an open-ended “please wait.” They’re not telling me to wait five seconds or five minutes or five years. They’re simply telling me to wait. Please.
I’ve called Time Warner Cable’s customer support enough times to know that they were going to tell me to reboot my cable box, which is about a 15-minute process and would have meant missing the end of Rectify anyway. So I tried another approach: Twitter. I tweeted this:
They responded shortly after, asking me if I had rebooted my cable box yet. I responded:
https://twitter.com/TWC_Help/status/334140407371943936
I direct messaged TWC my account info, just to see the whole thing play out, and the representative known only as “SS” explained succinctly: “I do apologize. At this time we are experiencing an outage in the area.”
I turned off my cable box and went to bed.
This post is not necessarily meant to pick on Time Warner Cable, which recently lost in the quarterfinals of Consumerist’s Worst Company in America 2013 tournament to fellow cable provider Comcast. In truth, my customer service experiences with their phone and physical customer service center representatives haven’t been entirely unpleasant. But if a big company like TWC is going to go through the trouble to hire someone to troll Twitter for negative comments about their product only to have them apologize for circumstances beyond their control, they’re doing something wrong.
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