Holding myself always accountable to my regular readers, it seems proper to report that my Internet connection service is stumbling a lot right now. Not the technology so much as my provider has gone bonkers on us.
Cox Cable makes its best profit from the TV service they want you to bundle with the other stuff the do. My regulars know that I hate TV. It’s not as if TPTB aren’t aware of how TV helps to keep us enslaved; they are counting on it and do what they can to restrict our options on official information so that we are denied such info without TV. I am not in a position to ignore it totally despite how much I despise it, so I do have a TV and do watch certain portions of news broadcasts, for example. But I’ll be darned if I let Cox bully me by punitive billing practices just because I won’t play sucker to their hard sell.
Right now their billing department is being downright abusive with us. It’s as if someone in their management is totally schizoid and changing their minds daily about what they are doing to us. We thought we had this thing settled amicably, but the next day it’s like storm troopers and they change things without bothering to tell us. This, on top of a rather shocking new fee schedule, along with periodic technology issues like DNS. They forget that there is competition.
I predict that we will end our relationship with Cox by the end of this month and switch to AT&T DSL services. For less money we can get a faster line (in theory). This means that my Cox email address will go away. Brothers and sisters, let me encourage you to switch to my other email addresses if you haven’t already:
ehurst909@gmail.com
broken@unseen.is
br073n@outlook.com
These three don’t rely on any particular ISP. As it is, I’ll have to go back through all my various online accounts and change the email address I use for those. There are a lot of them because that’s the way the world works.
It’s possible things with Cox won’t even last that long and I’ll be stuck having to use free wifi wherever I can get it for awhile. It’s plentiful here, but nothing very close to home. Thus, my access during such a time would be limited. The issue could be that Cox takes such a big bite out of us that it will take time to come up with the installation fees for DSL.
If any of this matters, or even entertains you, keep your eye out for posts under the “Admin” label. Thank you all for your prayers and support.
Update: I received information that Cox’s website and call center are both out-sourced. Further, within the company it is well known that those services are unreliable and hopelessly incompetent. So without knowing what a disaster it would turn out to be, we had requested moving our services via the website. This is the primary source of our troubles. When we went to a retail outlet staffed by actual employees of Cox, everything got fixed pretty quickly. I still wrote a strong letter to the local company offices via snail mail and may get a further response. But the take away here is that you should never, ever use Cox’s call center or website to do business with them. Always use a retail facility.
I run into the same hassle EVERY TIME I have to deal with issues concerning our monthly bills and don’t get me started on the bureaucratic constipation of the health care marketplace.