What A Bunch of Cox

Cox Cable, the near-monopoly for cable television/cable internet service in my little portion of Virginia, are an aptly named company. Yesterday, as Mexico pulled level at 2-2 (final score) against a 10-man German side, their Ninja Technician snuck into the apartment basement to disconnect my business internet service. And in doing this, obviously failed to stare at the worksheet for more than 6 seconds, and proceeded to disconnect all my cable services, instead of just the internet. And then he snuck out again like a wraith. Meanwhile, upstairs, I was staring somewhat perplexedly at a TV full of snow.

After a half-hour of careful prayer, I phoned them, wondering if perhaps there was a cable outage due to some overzealous gardener, but was gleefully informed that there was a disconnect notice on my internet for that day.

This was a little surprising, because I had received an assurance from two different people at Decipher that I would get a heads-up as soon as they knew the disconnect date, so I could plan a less-hurried transition. To his credit, finance-man "DP" had already bought me a few extra weeks. So after around 55 minutes of enquiries, transfers and holding with Cox, I find that another now dearly-departed finance employee had apparently signed the disconnect notice —twice— 3 weeks earlier!

Well, you might say, with you no longer there, the wheels move on, and one is quickly forgotten under the crush of things to do. And I would agree with you if I had been out of touch with the company since my 'vacation' had started. But this aforementioned finance gent been in contacted with me (after signing that order) a few times regarding other matters. Urgent matters he needed my help for. What matter you ask? The urgent matter of $217 (yes, two-hundred and seventeen!) of expenses billed to my company credit from earlier in the year.

Stop the presses! I better get that! And I did, very pleasantly, and even sent in a pixel-perfect expense report¹. So, as a rational man, is it reasonsable to think that during any of those 4 or 5 emails/phone calls, this gent may have surmised that it was a fine time to mention, in passing, that he'd already scheduled my bloody cable for disconnection!

Anyhow, the so-called Cox 'technician', had already slinked away into the shadows for his next session of sabotage, so they had to schedule a call-out, etc etc. Nothing till tomorrow. And thus my plans to watch the Confederations Cup Final game between Brazil and Argentina was also quashed.

Needless to say, one tends to be amazingly efficient when there is no TV and no internet!

To Cox's credit, they arrived today and fixed the problem, finally getting me the amplifier I so desperately needed due to miserable signal strength. Unusually, the service-person was a quite attractive girl, with the delightful name of Eva. In fact, when I opened the door and saw her there, jaunty toolbelt, holding lengths of black cable, and even the unflattering grey overalls failing to conceal the promise of what lay beneath, I initially thought I was about to be an integral part in some amateur porn movie!

Yeah, I know boys... should have snapped a picture. I'm not Ed you know.

⁽¹⁾ Most of the monies were spent on upgrading the CEO's laptop to OS X Tiger on the first day of release. I kid you not.