"Lucky" to Have Cable

It's Friday again, and time to mention something that is almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the world, but is such fun to write about.

I was 65 years old before I lived anywhere where I had cable television, as I wrote about last year in a related piece.  That may sound a bit strange, but I spent most of my adult life living in what can politely be called a rural area, in the mountains and foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.  For an awfully long time, that meant that we had television, but it was over-the-air stuff, what you could pull in with a big antenna on your roof.

We did that, not out of frugality but because the nature of cable TV is that it requires a signal to be brought to your home by an actual cable.  If the number of users per square mile is too low, it becomes unaffordable for a cable provider to serve the area, and the inhabitants put up big roof antennas.

In the early-mid 1990s, however, the first satellite-dish companies started installing their services, led by DirecTV (long before they became part of AT&T).  The benefit there was that no physical cable connection was necessary; as long as there were an unobstructed view of the part of the sky where the satellites were, you could watch not only the local network stations but anything that you could get on cable systems that was broadcast to a satellite.

My best girl and I were "early adopters", installing such a dish in 1995.  DirecTV has tens of millions of subscribers, so it would be funny to place a customer service call to them for whatever, and have them look at our six-digit customer number.  There weren't a lot of those left, and it was a hoot to have the tech who was on the phone point out that he or she was six years old when we got our account with DirecTV, meaning that the tech had effectively grown up with universal cable/satellite access.

We had only antenna service when we got the satellite dish, so I had never had cable service to that point, and the 21 years we had the DirecTV account.  But during that time, I had many opportunities to have to call customer service for a variety of utilities and services, and lots of instances of having frustrating conversations with well-meaning people in India and the Philippines, trying to answer my questions from a script they may or may not have actually understood.

And always repeating my problem back to me, as if I didn't understand what I had asked.  Nothing has probably caused more hard feelings toward South Asian people, whom I otherwise certainly have no issue with, than call centers.  There is an accent that I think is the result of young Filipino women in call centers being trained to try to Americanize their accents.  When I hear that on the phone I'm ready to hang up.

I had a call a year ago where I was trying to adjust my SiriusXM radio service to add a home receiver to the account of the radio in my car.  I spent 45 minutes on the phone with this one girl somewhere in Call Center Asia, and could not get an answer to what should have been an easy request.  I literally had three separate replacement receivers shipped to my home in the subsequent two weeks, although my receiver was not broken and didn't need replacement.

At the time, we were building a new home, and had to choose a cable provider because DirecTV was not going to be a workable option here (nothing bad about them).  In the condo we were staying in during construction, at the same time I had that lovely unproductive exchange with the SiriusXM person, we had Time-Warner cable service.  That was February 2017, literally the first time I had ever had cable in my home, even a temporary home like that condo.

Although the cable account was in the owners' names, we did have to call the company on a few occasion.  Time-Warner's customer service was located down the street, one would assume, from where SiriusXM's was, because it sounded like the same girl with the same questions -- and the same result, or frustrating non-result.

So in our new house we decided to take a risk and go with the other available option, a local cable company that operates in the coastal Carolinas, headquartered right in the county we live in.  They do only fiber-optic lines and very modern technology.  They were also willing and able to send a guy over to the construction site and tell us what we needed to arrange for, so as to have the services we wanted (TV, phone, Internet) designed into the build.  Friendly guy, local and working directly for the company.

The service was installed a couple days after we moved in, and naturally we had some follow-up service calls to tweak the service accordingly.  Each time, the service call was answered in their call center, which is located at their headquarters facility 14 miles down the road from us.  The person was helpful, informed, understood what I was asking without having to repeat the question, and possessed of an accent local to this area.

In other words, it was what customer service should be.

I happened to have called them yesterday to arrange for the baseball package for this season, and once again spoke to a pleasant and understandable voice, who totally understood what I needed and quickly arranged for it.  I almost wanted to stay on the phone just so that I could accumulate more good stories for friends back in Virginia (with global cable call centers) to envy, but that would be selfish.

I'm lucky to have cable TV service, but I'm a lot luckier to live where I can actually call their service line without trepidation or risking hypertension.  This is a small coastal town with its own virtues, but sometimes I feel the luckiest for having a cable company with local phone customer service.

You mean you don't?

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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