Don’t Reward a Company’s Bad Behavior May 7, 2020

This is an indirect follow-up to My Paper War with the Cable Company, Part I – May 7, 2020. In my opinion, six employees blatantly lied to me. No doubt the cable company would defend the employees, but when I ask a yes or no question and five of the employees reassure me that I won’t be charged if I pre-pay an electronic withdrawal, which was common practice back then, not sure about today. Then, I get an overdraft from my bank, there is no way a company can claim I misunderstood their employees’ answers. For the sixth employee, I politely and clearly requested cancelling my account. For whatever reason, he chose to ignore my request. He also lied about the modem being mine and not being on their inventory. I am guessing that was to avoid disconnecting me. As I never used the modem after I cancelled my account, I had no way of knowing I was still being billed. Not only that, but he gave me what he told me was the cancellation order. He also said I had no outstanding balance which was true in the sense as my bill was paid at the time.

It would be easier and a lot cheaper in time and money to simply pay the $143 and change, but that would be rewarding the company’s employees for bad behavior. I really don’t want to go through the hassle of spending days filling out online forms for the various Attorneys-General offices as well as the numerous federal regulatory agencies. I looked for an easy contact way to get in touch with someone at corporate. No dice. Another option would be to get one of the local channels to intervene, but that’s hit or miss, especially since they tend to have good reimbursement from the cable company and provide a lot of paid advertising for the cable company.

I have yet to get an answer as to why the last employee did not honor my request to cancel my service. The billing person cared more about me dealing with the collection agency even though I told her multiple times I had no plans to do so.

I won’t file a complaint with the BBB as past attempts to go that route with other companies were a waste of time. I need to get access to a printer as mine stopped working years ago.

I have no problem with praising a company when an employee goes above and beyond to help me or a friend. By the same token, I have no problem calling out a company when its employees did what these six employees did.