How About a Little Honesty, Please!

In the grand scheme of life, a situation I encountered Saturday night, is not a big deal. But it is one of those things that got under my skin and as is the case with many situations, the more knowledge I acquired about it, the angrier I got.

After a long day spent cleaning and decorating, I finally sat down around 8 pm with my Nachos Navidad and turned on the tube to watch yet another silly Christmas romance on Lifetime. This time a hapless young man finds out he is engaged to marry Santa's daughter! Crazy-- I know!

A little over an hour into this award-winning piece of holiday fluff, the screen goes blank. Then a message pops up, "no signal". No kidding! The next discovery I made was that almost every channel from 20 through 74 had vanished. I went from basic cable to barely cable! I did a channel scan to retrieve them. Nothing.

I then called the cable company, which shall remain anonymous, (you know who you are) and got put on what appeared to be eternal hold (yes, you can request a callback and hang up, but I didn't think it would be that long). My assumption (which later proved correct) was that I must not be the only person having an issue, considering the lengthy wait. After half-an-hour I hung up and resigned myself to watching a different silly holiday romance on one of the remaining channels, Hallmark.

Sunday, I again called my cable provider and after a short wait talked to a very affable gentleman named Mark. He convinced me, after he did some investigation, (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) that there were no system problems or outages, no other issues from other customers and that the problem was solely at my house, so I set up a service appointment.

At a birthday party later that afternoon with friends, I brought up the cable issue and it became very apparent that the friendly guy with the cable company had lied to me. Lied to me!!! Not only was I not the only one who had the problem, but for the most part doing a channel scan solved the problem for most of them. ("The issue is apparently only at your home ma'am"- -my ass!)

Once again this morning, I did a channel scan and lo and behold, issue resolved. Oh I'm keeping the appointment because I had planned to upgrade and consolidate my services, so my sisters and I could Skype for Christmas. But, suffice it to say I consider myself enlightened about and contemptuous of a company that chooses misrepresentation over truth when dealing with the customers who keep them in business!