Double Plus Ungood Day

Today is the day that I am trying to get my Time Warner Road Runner service installed, and my Clear service cancelled. That's not how it was supposed to be, but that is how it is.

The Clear saga started several months ago when they began throttling service on the tower I use. Given the company's situation I am not surprised that they are oversubscribed, but am infuriated that they try to say they only throttle people who have "excessive use" when neighbors who I unfortunately convinced to use Clear and hardly use the internet at all are also throttled during prime time.

In any event, my two year contract was up in mid-February, and having just made our last payment I thought I could cancel. Silly, silly me. Called the first time yesterday and due to "extraordinary call volume" (which they've had every time I've ever called) I was on hold for 10 minutes and finally had to drop off since I had a meeting to go to. So tried again at lunch, and after about 20 minutes of being routed through a couple levels of trying to convince me to change my mind, they were just about to cancel the account - then noticed that the last day was 2/18 not 2/16. Now, they agreed that I didn't owe them another payment, and so it's not like they were going to make more by making me wait a day. However their rules are their rules, and if I insisted on cancelling yesterday there would be a $150 early termination fee.

So I was already planning to call Clear after Time Warner installed my new service. But my install window was from 8-10am, and at 10:15 am there was still no installer or call. So I now have to call into Time Warner. Where they do something that drives me crazy about Clear as well. They ask you for the account information to be typed in before they connect you to an agent, and then the first thing the agent does is ask for THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION I JUST TYPED IN. But the brokeness doesn't end there. After a few minutes of checking they agreed that they had missed the window. And so they said they would automatically put me on my next window later today. IOW, promise we will show up in a 2 hours window but if you are lucky they will show up sometime during a 12 hour window. Worse, it turns out that the folks you call at Time Warner can't see if the dispatcher has made any notes about problems, and can't directly connect you to anyone to check.

Decide to try my luck at Clear again, they get me through the first level, put me on hold, then tell me they can't process my cancellation until their west coast office opens at 9am Pacific. Of course there's no reason to tell me that until they've spent several minutes on the first level.

At the moment I am having to access the world through my T-Mobile 4G data plan.

Will I finally get Time Warner service? Don't Know. Will I ever officially cancel my Clear service? Don't Know. For Clear I can at least cancel the card they charge, but I would prefer not to do that.

I have investigated other choices, but the only other wired provider is AT&T, and having used Dish satellite ISP service I know that both the speeds and the customer service are as bad or worse.

For all the talk about setting up a Mesh Network for privacy, I don't think that's going to be the big selling point. I think the big selling point is that you wouldn't have to deal with a Broken Customer Service interface.

Pity T-Mobile doesn't offer a $100/month truly unlimited 4G plan. The way things are going today I would be sorely tempted...

I hope your day is going better!