The jerk store called
It’s from an old-ish issue, but I just yesterday ran across Time Out New York‘s Con Ed Awards For Bad Service. I think they went too easy on Duane Reade — zombies aren’t usually actively rude — but amen to the bits on:
1. Time Warner Cable. My cable has gone out once every 6-8 weeks since I moved into this apartment over two years ago, and every time, every time, it’s the same shit: a) the modem blinks off; b) then the TV service goes out; c) I call Time Warner and sit on hold and then I have to go through the automated voice prompt system, which does not understand anything I say and which leads me through an endless series of pointless reboots of my modem, which will not work, because I already know what the problem is, because every time they come out here, they refuse to fix it; d) I finally get a person on the phone and the earliest appointment I can get is, minimum, a week away; e) when this person shows up, s/he tells me that the problem is the outside line, which is affixed, nonsensically enough, not to the building in which I actually live and expect to receive service for $150+ a month, but to a building two doors down, into/onto which the Time Warner serviceperson does not have permission to go, so they jury-rig some “solution” and leave and a month and a half later, it happens all over again.
The last time this happened? Ten minutes — literally ten minutes — after this happened. “Hi, I’m Sarah Bunting. I just sold my TV website, but can neither watch television nor access the internet. Please address me as ‘the consummate media professional’ from now on. Thank you and goodnight. Also, I am Amish.” And that went on for, no shit, a week. I had to use Skyrockets’s kitchen as TWoP South Base Command Central, and yes, that state of affairs led to the occasional moment of hilarity — I’m sitting on a conference call and Skyrockets, forgetting that, rips a juicy Diet Coke belch because, you know, he lives there, so I give him this look that’s half “niiiiiiiice reverb, duder” and half “cheese it, the cops!” and he’s all, “What? …Oh, shit, sorry. [brrrep]” and then we both got the church giggles — but that isn’t the point.
The point is that I totally just got fired. Awesome.
Oh, wait, that isn’t the point either. The point is that I don’t care whether you “have permission” to get up onto the other building and fix the goddamn outside connection — break into the building, climb up it with a grapple hook, get Spiderman to give you a lift, I don’t give a shit, but unless I “have permission” not to pay my bill ever again? Find a way.
It’s fixed, for now anyway, because the last guy parkoured over to the connection joint and tuned it up, God bless him — in the snow, no less — but only because I told him what I’ve just told you and concluded that if he didn’t go up there, I would, and when it came time to explain to my grieving mother how I electrocuted myself, it would be his problem.
Now the DVR guide keeps crapping out, but whatever, I don’t need to know what’s on.
2. R&A Cycles. Oh my God, DICKHEADS in that place! If you don’t ride a bike that cost more than Lohan’s last birthday party, don’t have male secondary sexual characteristics, and don’t seem willing to spend EIGHTY DOLLARS ON A TIRE PUMP, you might as well not exist at that school. When you can get their attention, which is rare, they’re complete crotches who don’t know how to make change, and seriously, excuse me, but it is a TIRE PUMP. You want me to pay $80, you’d better gold-plate that bitch, because no.
It’s by far the closest bike shop to where I live but I wouldn’t go in there again if the rest of the world were on fire and R&A was a swimming pool. You shouldn’t either.
(Addendum: If you know a good Slope/Boerum Hill bike shop, post it in the comments.)
Tags: city living curmudgeoning retail
Glad to know you have cable service back. It’s not just cable that gives y ua hard time, we recently had trouble with DirecTV and and upgrade to HD. I wrote it up on my really random reviews blog page if you want to see it.
I won’t attach the link because I don’t know what your rules are, but it posted on Jan 22 of this year.
Oh, and I like the new page so far and I really like the comments!
I would like to add Comcast of Montclair, NJ to the list. FOUR consecutive weekends blown due to their incompetency. Ugh.
Ohhhhhhh, word.
I’m coming off a four-service-visit TWC extravaganza for the same reason: my connection box isn’t accessible from my apartment building. Per Visit #1, the box was located in a nearby day spa, which was of course not open during Visit #1. Also, being a day spa, it is super busy on the weekends, so TWC people could only get back there during the week, when I am at work. Off to a good start.
So I called TWC, told them to go to the spa midweek without me and tighten the screws or whatever, and take care of it. That led to Visit #2 in which the cable guy apparently just showed up, got confused when I wasn’t at home (even though I told them I wouldn’t be at home), and left. Visit #3, lather, rinse, repeat.
That led to a showdown with TWC customer service in which I serenely explained that the cable guy could either have me around or have access to the building where the problem was, but not both. I said if there wasn’t some way to work it out, I’d have to cancel my service. His response was “I guess you’ll have to cancel.” One decreasingly serene 85-minute wait later I got hold of aa supervisor, who agreed to send one last guy over (though still not at a time when the spa was definitely available): Visit #4.
#4 shows up, realizes that the connection box is not in fact at the spa, but is instead at a nearby restaurant that is open virtually 24/7. Problem fixed in 5 minutes.
Awesome.
My TWC was just out for the 4th time in 2 years, because the frakkin people spliced my cable line from the apartment underneath, and everyone time someone moves out, they disconnect me, even tho they swear up and down they have the line tagged in big huge letters DO NOT DISCONNECT.
But will they rewire? Noooooo! Fuckers.
Sars: I read the second portion of your post to mr.fastiller and he told me to let you know that R&A Cycles has had that reputation since God was in short pants. It’s not just that you have to ride the sort of bike that many of us mere mortals might have to take financing to afford for them to talk with you, but they are truly condescending. It is as if, he said to me, they think that they are the old crotchety waitress that is spoken of in awestruck tones all through the land and people make pilgramage to say that they were served by her. They are not.
I also asked him about recommendation for shops in the area, he said he’d look into it. We’ll see what our local (in Queens) bike shop says: it’s been around for three generations and might know your neighbourhood.
Back to Duane Reed, what IS it with the “Did you find everything you were looking for?” If you say no, they don’t DO anything, they just give you this glazed blank look. They don’t say sorry, they don’t ask what it was that you didn’t find, they don’t write anything down. Why do they waste my time and theirs???
Bike shop in Park Slope: Dixon’s on Union between 6th and 7th. They’ve been very nice to me every time I went, and I clearly am a girl and know nothing about bikes. Also? Free air for your tires outside the shop, with a little bench to sit on.
Dude, I have Comcast, but it’s the same song. My internet would go out, I’d call, talk to robots, have some jagoff tell me that something’s wrong on my end and they’ll send someone out in 7 days, because it’s not like I use the internet, the guy would come, and he’d be like, “There’s some sort of problem with the outside line.” And I’d be like, “Fix it?” And he’d tell me he couldn’t, and basically “tune up” my crap box. I finally got pissed and cancelled internet, because I’m not paying $75 a month to get screwed around. If I wasn’t a DVR Junkie, I’d have cancelled cable, too, but… I don’t think I can live without Bravo, E!, Discovery and Food Network anymore. Which is probably sad for me, but whatever.
Amazingly enough, in the almost-a-year I’ve had Cablevision for, I’ve never had one outage, or one problem with their customer service people, which is far more than I can say for every experience I’ve ever had with Time Warner. Maybe the solution is to move to Bushwick. (That has to be the first time *that* phrase has ever been uttered.)
I am going to start calling people who bother me “crotches”. I’ll make sure I trademark you, don’t worry.
FYI, Sars, I also have the dreaded TWC, and to get to talk to someone right away, just dial the 1-800 number and keep pressing zero. It’s works in three states so far (not NY, but I have my fingers crossed for you). Of course, that won’t solve your actual problem, but at least you won’t have to go through the Voice Prompt System That Ate Time to talk to a human being.
Sarah: Nice WordPrecipice.
RE: R&A Bikes. Ouch. Yeah, they are known for that particular brand of elitist numbnuttery of which reputations are unfortunately made. It has something to do with the fact that the place advertises and thinks of itself as a shop for “real cyclists.” (read spandexed dbs who race around Prospect Park every morning and evening and who WILL run you over if given half a chance).
I can recommend 4 great shops, but only one of them is going to be close to you.
In Manhattan
Bicycle Habitat–some of the friendliest staff you’ll meet and their Web site is the most informative of any bike shop Web site I’ve ever seen.
http://bicyclehabitat.com/index.cfm
Sid’s–This one is in Murray Hill and I do a lot of shopping there b/c it’s close to work. Good service and friendly folk.
http://nymag.com/listings/stores/sids-bike-shop/
The Bike Shop is probably closest to you. It’s on Union Street between Columbia and Hicks. It’s a Mom and Pop run store. Nice.
http://www.smalltownbrooklyn.com/carrollgardens/carrollgardensW/E-W/union/union1a.html
And NYCBikes in Williamsburg–more than anyone else, I think these people understand what urban cycling is all about. Their bikes are built specifically for use in our fair city.
http://www.nycbikes.com/
I bought my most recent bike from this company and LOVE it. Am actually riding it from Seattle, WA to Bar Harbor, Maine this summer.
Two more resources that are fantastic
http://www.recycleabicycle.org/
and Times Up! Bicycle Advocacy par excellance! (they have free bike repair workshops!!!)
http://times-up.org/calendar/calendar.php
Good Luck. I hope this helps.
I’ll spare you my Time Warner drama, because it is exactly the same as yours and the others who have written comments. Mine’s finally fixed, but it involved climbing a fence.
I second Dixon’s Bike Shop on Union between 6th & 7th. They’ve never been anything but nice to me (and I have a really crappy bike).
I have TWC and have a problem with my cable about twice a year. The latest round was a real doozy. After the phone hell, I finally got a person who did the same thing the always do which is restart the box from wherever they are. I know how to restart the box and if that was the problem I would have already fixed it myself. After going through their script they finally realized that the error message I was getting meant that I was receiving no signal from them. That’s something a technician has to fix in person. Great. They had something the following week “sometime between 8:00 and 6:00.” I have a job and that was impossible for me, as it would be for most people. They had something with a four hour window the week after that so I took it. When the technician finally showed up, it was something he couldn’t fix because it needed to be re-wired and he didn’t do that. Reschedule for the wiring guy another day. He comes with inaccurate information about the problem and does not have the proper equipment. Comes back the next day, does the re-wiring. In the course of his repairs he rips the old wires off my house and throws them in my antique rose garden, breaking several limbs which were pretty well along in their spring growth. Then he didn’t even have the courtesy to haul the old wires off, he just leaves them laying around my backyard and driveway. I was without cable for two weeks and am waiting for my bill to see if they actually pro-rated it like they said they would after I threw a hissy fit.
Oh the horrific irony. Not an hour after reading this entry, I went to work (I manage a pub) only to find the bar’s HD Cable receiver wasn’t working! Regular cable worked, but no joy to my nice big plasma TV. 3 hours after calling the problem to Charter (and being transferred 4x!)….the baseball game (but we’re loosing hard, darn Mets) halfway over….still no tech yet. =(
I’ve done the round and round with Comcast cable a couple of times but my most recent descent into phone service heck was with AAA. My car dies on an off ramp of I-95. I call AAA and explain I am on the south bound off ramp of I-95 at exit 46. The call taker replies that, “Ok, you are south of exit 46.” I explained I was on the offramp. She tells me they have to enter it as on the highway and the tow truck will see me. I explain that I am not on the highway; I am almost at the end of the off ramp. We have this exchange 5 times. Each time I explain where I am, she gives me a different version of somewhere on the highway.
After 5 mintues I finally convince her that the tow truck will have to take the exit ramp to find me. Next she questions what is wrong with my car. I explain that I was on the off ramp when my car died and now it will not start. She says, “OK, your car won’t start.” I explain that it died while in motion and then I would not turn over at all. I tell her I know it is not a battery problem. She asks how old the battery is so I again explain that the battery is not the problem and the car needs to be towed. After another 5 minutes of back and forth I finally feel that I convinced her that I had a non-electrical, non-battery problem. She says that tow truck will be dispatched and I hang up.
30 minutes later the tow truck arrives. The driver gets out of the truck and grabs a battery pack (the kind used to jump start cars with dead batteries) and walks up to my car. I explain what happened and he looks at me with a VERY condenscending look and replies rather snippily, “Well, thats not a battery problem and a jump start isn’t going to help!” I look at him for a moment and decided raising my voice would do no good, after all he is a vicitm of AAA as much as I am. I calmly say, “I know, that’s what I told AAA about 7 times but the girl just didn’t get it.” His whole demeanor changed, he pulled my car up onto the flat and towed me and my 9 months pregant wife to a garage and then gave us a ride home.
We spent most of the ride making fun of AAA and trading horror stories about their telephone people.
I’ll be over here, singing the ‘Comcast Cable Sucks’ song. (It’s a catchy tune. Seems to be popular.) Seriously, when we moved, we transferred our service to a new house less than twenty miles away, and set up the appointment for 3:30 the day we moved in, as it was during the football playoffs, and I am not about to miss a playoff game because of something as silly as moving.
By 7:30 PM three days later, they finally showed up to turn our cable on.
Did I mention that when they finally turned on the cable and internet (Oh, Lord, three days with no cable and no internet. NEVER AGAIN.) they deleted our email accounts? No, not disabled. Deleted. Poof. Into the ether. Their reason? ‘Oh, I didn’t think you wanted to transfer those.’
As if all that drama wasn’t ridiculous enough, I had to return our old cable box personally, because even the cable guys were concerned that if they returned it, it would get lost in the warehouse. (We moved just over the line from Comcast Cable of Montgomery County to Comcast Cable of Chester County.) I hied my ample rear into town to return the box, and came home to…no cable. They’d removed the BRAND NEW BOX from our cable account and left on the one I returned.
When they finally fixed it another three days later, I walked out with free cable for two months, free internet for three and HBO and Showtime free for a year. Man.
Let me second (third, fourth) Dixon’s. I grew up on 6th between Berkley and Union, so we went there All The Time growing up, with varying degrees of fancy and not-fancy bikes, and they were unfailingly pleasant and helpful and awesome.
Ya’ll just do not know how to have fun with the voice activated menus! As a person with a very Southern accent, The King’s English Only Accent Modulator refuses to understand my answer half the time so when you get the first prompt to talk say something like ‘hidy-hidy-clam chowder’ and it will tell you it didn’t understand and say your reply again, then you can tell it something like ‘I thought Battlefield Earth was the best movie ever!’ and it will inform you that it will be connecting you with a live operator immediately. Who will then speak with an accent so heavy that you have no idea what they are saying.
The point is that I totally just got fired. Awesome.
Dood, I really hope this was in your sarcastic voice, or I will be forced to give rise to a resounding “OH FUCK” on your behalf and send any number of vitriolic screeds to Bravo.
… Of course, said screeds are likely to be all in my head, but, hey – it’s the thought that counts right? With my work schedule, I’m lucky to be having thoughts at all.
Gah, the bad Time Warner memories…when I lived in Stuyvesant Town, my Internet was out for over weeks. They kept saying it was my wiring, and I’d pretty much have to beg them to even bother checking the network status. Finally, after three weeks had passed, I finally got a manager on the phone, and was told “Engineering is working on it”. When I asked if Engineering had given them any sort of idea of when the problem would be fixed, their reply was that, in effect, Engineering and Customer Service had no way to communicate with each other, and that I should pretty much just stop calling them and it would work when it worked. Fortunately, Stuy Town has cable choice at the apartment level, and I called RCN for an installation the next day.
When I moved to my current apartment, my first question was “what cable system do you have?” I will not live in a building with Time Warner. The only time I ever had a problem with RCN, the (very cheerful) guy who answered the phone checked the network status before even suggesting I cycle the modem power – “ah, we have an outage, ConEd cut one of our wires, it should be back on in 2 hours. Do me a favour and give it 3, and if it isn’t on, call me back. Here’s my direct line…” Infinitely better.
As for Duane Reade, I swear they only hire out of a little-known publication called “The Crabby People Times” – I can count the number of times I had decent service at a DR in 6 years in Midtown on the fingers of one hand. But they were bloody everywhere, and the nearest CVS was a hike. Now that my employer has shipped me off to the wasteland of Jersey City (motto: “At Least We’re Not Camden!”, I have a choice of exactly one CVS. They’re incompetent, but at least cheerful about it.
God. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s had giant horrible problems with Comcast. After almost two years of back and forth with the whole, oh it’s an outside line problem, outages every month, (I am getting angry just thinking about all of it)– they FINALLY came to fix my outside line issue by running new line through my whole building. For which I had to clean out a closet and leave crap all over my living room for almost two weeks, cause hell, who knows when they’ll actually get to my apartment??
They rewire the apartment and leave my cable hooked up to the old juryrigged line, which they shut off. And there’s no way to hook the new line up cause the cables don’t fit together and I am having an stroke made out of RAGE.
And then it takes them 5 more days to get someone back there to rehook up my cable.
Comcast is evil bitchewads and I hate them so much.
I second Ethan F’s “The Bike Shop” recommendation. I am neighbors with the owners, and they have always done a nice job of helping with bikes in the neighborhood. There’s also no snobbery about what kind of bike you have.
Duane Reade? FEH. The Eckers in Carroll Gardens? TRIPLE DOG FEH! It took them a week to do one hour photo processing, but I couldn’t get my film back because they already took it out of the canister, plus the place is a godforsaken mess and they NEVER have their shelves fully stocked!
The secret to getting better customer service? Write a detailed, reasoned, eloquent letter to the president of the company, sounding the refrain “Is this really what you consider adequate customer service?”
One week later, you will get a call from a flunky in said president’s office, and all your issues will be addressed, like magic. This has worked for me with both Verizon Wireless and TWC.
Moral of the story: always deal with principals.
I work in PR for one of the large cable companies mentioned in the rants. If you’ve got a problem, call the PR department and threaten to contact the media if your problem isn’t resolved. Your problem will be resolved.
Hi. Dish network? Do they have that in NY? Because it’s pretty cool and I hate the whole cable monopoly thing anyway.
My sister has been divorced from her husband for almost two years but we keep him around because he works for Cox Communications. We never have to call the worthless customer service number. We just provide the ex-brother in law with a cold diet Coke and he takes care of any and all cable and cable internet problems we have. He’s awesome.