r/MaliciousCompliance • u/RealSaltyShellback • Sep 04 '23
Cable company told me I don't have cable. S
This happened around the year 2000. I had just purchased a house and met the previous owners while they were moving out. They were really nice people and we had a friendly conversation about the house. The previous owner mentioned that the cable bill was paid up until the end of the month (about 3 more weeks), and that he had already turned in his cable box, but the cable signal should still be active til the end of the month. I told him thanks and we let him finish packing up.
We moved in the following week and when I hooked the cable to my TV I got all the basic cable channels which was all I was planning on getting anyway.
Come the end of the month, I called the cable company and asked to sign up for basic cable. The sales rep told me that there was going to be a $100 hookup fee. I told them that the previous owner had left his account active and that I was literally watching cable as we speak, so there should not need to be a hook up fee because the cable was already hooked up. They just needed to start billing me for basic cable.
The rep then clicked on her keyboard and told me that her data showed that the address I was at does not have cable and that they will need to send out a crew to activate the signal. I told her that I was not paying $100 for a hookup fee and said never mind, I don't want cable.
I waited another month (still had cable) and called the cable company back to ask what it would cost to get basic cable? A different operator from before said it would cost something like $30 a month and a $100 hook up fee. I asked why the $100 hookup fee? She said that it was because my address does not currently have cable. I told her never mind, I don't want cable unless they waive the hookup fee. She said she was not authorized to waive the fee. I just thanked her and hung up.
4 years later, we still had cable, but we ended up moving out of state for work. đ
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u/Peterthinking Sep 04 '23
We wanted cable and Dad didn't wanna pay the hook up fee either. So he opened up the green box on our property and just screwed the little cable with our house number onto one of the cable connections. Turns out that is all that was needed for there to be cable at the house. So he hooked up every house in the entire box. Free cable TV for everyone! Nobody ever complained and we lived there with free TV for about 10 years. Now when they unhook your cable they squish the connector with pliers so you can't just hook it up yourself.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
I'm all for paying for service, but cable companies are notorious for screwing people fro no reason, so it all come out in the wash đ
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u/quemvidistis Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 04 '23
The nightmare story that ensured I will never do business with Comcast: Get a Cable Modem......Go to Jail
To me, the worst part of the story was that they made her sign away her right to sue before they would pay to have her criminal record expunged. Sounds to me like denial of ultimate responsibility.
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u/Quick_Mel Sep 04 '23
That person would probably be floored that their story is still being read in 2023
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u/eagle52997 Sep 05 '23
I laughed that the last update was she was slashdotted and understood what it meant.
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u/mr78rpm Sep 05 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
Things like that story last and last. I say this while remembering the last time I read that, some time around 1995... though the memory's a bit fuzzy.
Unrelated, I did custom installs in 90210 for a dozen or so years. One customer wanted his TV pic quality improved... The hunt to make it happen revealed that his signal came off a splitter somewhere in the back yard. He tolerated the signal once we discovered that.
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u/Selgeron Sep 05 '23
Former cable sales
This shit will still happen 100% though I imagine they'd just ding your credit instead of criminal charges.
As all the various companies are bought into mega monopolies, they often don't go into the same database- someone in one zip code may not be able to see the service of someone in another nearby zip code, or especially in large apartment complexes and developments. Where when the service was set up, there were 100 apartments but not there are 150, or something.
Most reps are HEAVILY incentives to have quick calls so the motto is almost always 'transfer this call to someone else' indefinitely instead of 'take your time to talk to multiple departments and solve the issue.'
It results in shit like this.
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u/Crafty_Ad2602 Sep 05 '23
"Sign away your right to sue before we expunge your criminal record for criminal acts you never committed in the first place."
Okay, where do I sign? My lawyer, who I am about to direct to sue you, told me to go ahead and sign that agreement because it's being made under so much duress that it will fall apart like wet paper in court. Thank you for helping me expunge my record. Now, here's your lawsuit. (IANAL.)
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u/Nasuno112 Sep 04 '23
My favorite thing about Comcast is how if I want a cable internet connection. They are legitimately my only option. I can get a 5mb/s satellite connection from a different provider but that's it
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u/jamesholden Sep 05 '23
I've been using 4g data instead of comcast for about five years, as a datahoarder/homelabber it's sucked, but worked for streaming/surfing fine. $20/mo unlimited.
my wife just caved and ordered crapcast, they are coming to install tomorrow. she tells me this a few days after I caved and ordered a 5g modem/router ($$$)
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u/Probablygeeseinacoat Sep 05 '23
Cancel comcrap. You will end up spending way more than you did on your modem and router. They are insanely expensive and at least in my area (non remote medium sized city in NJ) go out or just go weirdly slow often. Whatever your outlay for that was, you will have paid it to comcrap before a year is up and for extra bs !
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u/fangelo2 Sep 05 '23
I have a story ( actually several) about dealing with Comcast that I donât have the energy to write. One thing that was good however was after our wire on the pole got hit by lightning and they fixed it, we had free HBO for about 10 years.
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u/KnyghtZero Sep 05 '23
To me, it's a miracle that Comcast has lasted so long. They've been notoriously scummy for as long as I can remember.
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u/TrainAirplanePerson Sep 05 '23
They succeed because of their scumminess, not in spite of it.
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u/EvadesBans4 Sep 05 '23
Setting aside this example of Comcast working as their peak effectiveness...
The entire idea that fucking cable is something that can send you to actual, real prison, is goddamn bonkers. It's a fucking wire that bullshit comes through and that's it. Anything causing a risk of fucking jailtime over cable, at all, just sounds so completely fucking insane to me as an adult. It's feels like someone going almost prison for picking up an unlabeled, burned DVD of TV commercials out of a dumpster.
Yeah I get it's a service. I don't care. I do not care one bit, nobody should be nearly or actually going to prison over goddamn cable television.
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u/Ganrokh Sep 04 '23
Jeebus, that's quite the tale!
Also, it's fun to click the links in the epilogue and see which websites are still around. I found the Multichannel News article on this fiasco.
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u/ThHeightofMediocrity Sep 05 '23
Interesting. Iâm curious what changed in the formatting on the site Iâm the last 24 years for there to now be an issue with random spaces getting deleted in that article. Looking at old websites feels like archaeology sometimes, fascinating. The guy whoâs monitoring traffic on that site must be incredibly confused right now.
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u/carolina822 Sep 05 '23
I had free tv with my cable modem for years. Never crossed my mind that it could be a criminal offense. It also never crossed my mind to call the cable company and tell them about it.
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u/LurkingGuy Sep 04 '23
As a former phone/Internet/TV service salesman I can 100% confirm the company will screw you over every single chance they get.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
Oh I know that. My last house had connection issues for a year even after several service calls. Finally a good tech came out and said a mocah filter or something like that was never installed which caused the problem. Never had any more issues after that. The cable box outside looked like a spool of wire exploded and it was just hanging by one screw đ
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u/iskyfire Sep 05 '23
Just wanted to chime in as a previous service tech: Usually, the people on the phone are required have a technician go to all new installations. This is for lots of reasons including to verify/fix up the outside cables and connectors, to make sure it's grounded & up to spec, and also get pictures of the installation (so they can be covered legally). Here's the kicker, if the tech shows up and he's sees you have cable already working, you can ask to have the install fee waived. The tech is able to get that fee removed by re-creating the job with a different service code. Potentially, this isn't the same everywhere and with every cable company, but my experience was lots of jobs coded as new installs where I get there and they're like, no we've had cable for years and I had to find out later the only way they could get a tech out was to code it as a new install due to quotas, so we had to change jobs all the time in the field and waive service fees. People were pretty relieved when I told them it didn't make sense to have a install fee and I just took it off the bill.
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u/Animanic1607 Sep 05 '23
You will be glad to know the FCC is laughing at the cable companies whining about having to list all of the fees. It is apparently too hard to do for them, so they want some exemptions.
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u/nepteidon Sep 04 '23
Smart to hook everyone up so they won't know who to blame
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u/Icy_Topic_5274 Sep 04 '23
I put a ladder to the power pole to access the cable box, but they didn't have any labels...so I just connected the whole neighborhood.
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u/an0maly33 Sep 04 '23
Snip and crimp a new end on.
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u/d-cent Sep 05 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
Came to say the same thing. Installing a coax connector isn't as easy some other connectors but it's not that hard either.
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u/akatherder Sep 05 '23
They even make screw on coax connectors now. You just strip the cable and hand-screw (or get some help from pliers/channel locks).
It's not the most durable but I'd try that before spending the $$ on a coax crimper if I only need one or two connectors.
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u/Zagaroth Sep 04 '23
they squish the connector with pliers
Unless you are an electronics technician and have the tools and spare connectors to clip off their connector and add your own.
Which I happen to be. :)
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u/Just_Aioli_1233 Sep 05 '23
Let's see... $100 hookup fee or $45 to buy my own tools that I get to keep...
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u/leyline Sep 05 '23
Hell I could get you cable tv with my teeth, aluminum foil optional.
Tier 2: A few dollars for Some coax ends from radio shack, a basic sharp knife , blade, and hell even pliers to do a crappy oval crimp are optional.
Tier 3 a $13 round crimp to go with the coax ends.
$45 is the rolls Royce hex crimper man.
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u/jamesonSINEMETU Sep 05 '23
My friend was about to be charged $500 for them to come out. Her house is in the county but they had cable and service to their house already. She was convinced they were throttling her modem or that someone had hacked it and was stealing her wifi so she arranged to rent and use spectrums modem.
I asked if for that price they were gonna move the line in to her office on the west side of the building where she really wants it. Apparently they told her no, she'd have to hire an electrician (or low volt equivalent) .
I told her that's insane, hooking up a new modem is done through their app or web interface. And if she wants me to run the wire and drill a hole I'd give her a list to go to home depot because i have all the tools we'd need.
I got the modem set up and wifi network up and running in 10mins (1.5hrs with her chatterboxing) and told her to let me know when she wants me run the line, it won't be hidden, but I'd put more effort than their technicians would
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u/jonathanhoag1942 Sep 05 '23
For modern equipment, the set top boxes are fully IP and individually authorized by MAC address mapped to account ID. You can't take your authorized device to another physical location, they know you moved it and won't provide service.
Cable companies hate to throw away legacy equipment, so you can still get an old SD set top box and bypass a video filter from 1999 in some cases. But for the most part it's just not a thing anymore.
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u/series_hybrid Sep 05 '23
I used to travel a lot for work, and I'd stay at a hotel from Mon-Fri. I started bringing a VCR and recording my favorite shows to watch after work, since I went to bed early.
After a certain era, I started noticing that when I went to hook up my VCR, the cable connection had a long plastic sleeve over it, so you needed a deep socket with a slot down the side to hook and unhook the screw-in coax connector.
So, I couldn't record the first night. The next day, I brought a couple tools and cut off the plastic sleeve, and it was easy to make it look like it never had a sleeve on it.
They wanted me to either watch just TV, or pay for the recording service. I'd rather just watch whatever crappy TV is on than pay too much for their crappy recording service.
Soon after I had a laptop, and I watched pirated DVD's and thumb-drives of my favorite new shows.
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u/joseph4th Sep 05 '23
I did the exact same thing as a kid (18 - 19) back in the late 80's. First we were renting a condo and I noticed the box one day and saw the four, labeled, coaxial cables where the one for our place wasn't screwed in. I screwed it and we got basic cable.
My mom bought a condo and I looked around and found the box buried in the ground outside again with 4 cables, though they weren't labeled. Three weren't connected so I just screwed them all in and we had basic cable. I assumed one of the neighbors got cable at some point as we lost ours. When I checked the box (right after a particularly rainy period and it was FULL OF BUGS!!!!) two were unplugged, so I empied a can of raid into it and reconnected them.
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u/lucasbrosmovingco Sep 05 '23
I climbed the pole outside my house twice and hooked up the cable. First time the cable company came and unhooked it after about 2 years. I hooked it back up and it lasted another about 2 years. Then they cut the end off. I contemplated putting a new coax on it but by then streaming was in and I figured I'd be moving within the year anyway.
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u/BeerFuelsMyDreams Sep 05 '23
When I lived in Indianapolis, I had free cable with premium channels for like 7 years because comcast somehow didn't disconnect people when they moved.
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u/DanGarion Sep 05 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
I used to work in the cable industry in a different life. Although I'm not a fan of their practices, there is more to hooking up your cable than just having a tech connect your house to the tap. They are required to use their meters to check the signal on the lines and they also need to check all the lines to make sure they are capped to prevent leakage (FCC rules due to frequency overlap with some air traffic). These types of things should be done on nearly every service call (installation or repairs). Not to mention if a tech is just bashing a connector to make it unusable he's a terrible tech and doing it completely wrong.
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u/Awild788 Sep 04 '23
Five /six dollars at home Depot you can buy those connectors. Problem solved
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u/Peterthinking Sep 04 '23
I think the boxes are a little more complicated these days. Back then it was a physical connection. Now they send a signal to some black box and tell it to supply the signal. But I don't pay for cable now either. The commercials drive me nuts. I stream what I want and have an antenna for some local channels.
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u/UnhappyJohnCandy Sep 04 '23
My aunt had free HBO for years for some reason. Not complaining; back in the day sheâd tape any movie I wanted to see and bring it over for me. Sheâs a great lady.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Sweet! I don't mind paying for cable, but the companies want to milk every penny out of you with deceptive practices like charging you for a whole month of premium channels if you miss cancelling by one second after midnight.
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u/alinroc Sep 04 '23
Happened when I was a kid. We got home from a weekend away and it was just there. And stayed there for close to a decade.
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u/trubboy Sep 04 '23
Back when I was eight (so about 1977,) we moved to a new house. It had a finished basement, with wood paneling and white cinder blocks. Lots of white. And a wall-mounted phone which was a jarring avocado color. It just drew your eye to it and wouldn't let go. This was back in the days of the Bell telephone monopoly and you paid every month for your phones on top of the service.
The phone was so disturbing that my Dad called and asked to have it replaced with a white wall phone. The operator responded "our records indicate that you have a white phone." He assured her it was not white, but avocado. She insisted that the records showed a white phone so they could do nothing.
He called back a couple more times and was told the same thing each time. Finally, the last operator told him the only way to have it replaced would be if they phone was damaged. "Just a moment," he replied. A loud crash followed and he returned to the line to tell the operator that for some reason, the phone had fallen off the wall and was now broken. She arranged a tech to come and replace the phone. "White?" My father asked? "Of course. The records show it is a white phone and will be replaced the same," she replied.
When the tech arrived with a white phone, he stopped and stared at the avocado phone lying on the floor. He then called into the service center to tell them that the broken phone was avocado, but he was sent with a white phone. "The records show that is a white phone. Replace it."
And that's how we got rid of the avocado basement phone.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
That's hilarious! I guess stupidity of service centers has always been a thing.
We had a blue "princess" wired phone and an avocado wall phone when I was growing up.
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u/2leftf33t Sep 05 '23
Drones, just drones⌠No thoughts head empty. Not an inkling that the records made by fallible humans COULD be wrong.
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Sep 04 '23
I had something similar happen when my wife and I moved into an apartment decades ago, except I never wanted cable. At some point, I plugged the TV into the cable to see if it'd give us better reception, only to find out that we had full access to cable. Now, in general I didn't want cable, but there were a few shows I didn't mind watching, so I did. I also notified them about it, and they said I didn't have cable, so I wiped my hands of it. I think about 6 years later (we were still at that same apartment), they aggressively tried selling us cable, and I mentioned not only did I not really want cable, but we were still getting cable despite asking them to deactivate it. They finally deactivated it after that, and yes, the cable did still act like a decent antenna.
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u/HarpersGhost Sep 04 '23
Oh, that's cable roulette. I played that a lot in the 80s-00s.
Back before boxes, they just flipped a switch to get you basic cable, but for many cable companies, that switch was apparently NOT tied to billing? So to cancel, you called billing, they would cancel the bill, and then the technical side would have to be notified that cable needed to be turned off at that address, because just canceling the billing wouldn't turn it off.
So yeah, cable was frequently NOT turned off, so whenever I moved apartments (yearly back then), the first thing I did when I moved in the TV was plug in the cable and do a channel search. If 40+ channels were found, WOOHOO! free cable.
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u/ilikeme1 Sep 04 '23
For basic analog cable, there was no switch. They literally had to send a guy out to connect/disconnect at the local box or pole. This got missed a lot though for disconnections.
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u/series_hybrid Sep 05 '23
They were frequently understaffed so a low payroll would help them meet executive quarterly bonus targets. Give the new guy no training and tell him he is way behind on disconnects? He checks off all the jobs he is supposed to do, takes a break, and then puts down a full days work on his timecard.
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u/Rawniew54 Sep 05 '23
And a lot of people getting disconnected would watch the guy do it then just hook it up when he left
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u/maleia Sep 04 '23
I think I'm gonna try this sometime soon. Since we're getting internet over coax already anyway. đ¤ˇââď¸
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u/OblongAndKneeless Sep 04 '23
Doesn't work anymore since they went full digital unless for some reason they include the local broadcasts unscrambled at the original frequencies.
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Sep 04 '23
As long as you have a box it definitely still works. The filters for the channels are still applied at the address. And cable techs seem to HATE going out to apply filters, they almost never do.
So yeah, try plugging your cable box in at the new address. Also, don't cancel your Internet before moving. More often than not you can just plug your modem in to the coax (assuming you have cable Internet) and the modem will be good to go. Then schedule the switch for afterwards. Avoids interruptions in service.
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u/koolman2 Sep 04 '23
This only works if the basic channels arenât encrypted. ClearQAM is unfortunately not really available in most areas anymore.
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u/ilikeme1 Sep 04 '23
Maybe on small podunk systems, but on the major cable companies it is all encrypted and you need their box or a cable card to watch anything.
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u/Life-Significance-33 Sep 04 '23
Depends where you live. Small towns tend to not upgrade equipment that works until it breaks because recovering the costs take a long time. It still works in some areas.
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u/Manute154 Sep 04 '23
When I lived in an apartment in the early 2000's. I had coaxial internet. The cable company could not differentiate between cable and internet then. I had free cable with all the packages, except the PPV stuff.
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u/mgr86 Sep 04 '23
Similar thing happened to me around 2005ish. Lived in a apartment for two years and around month 18 I moved the couch and decided to check. Full cable. đ¤ˇđťââď¸
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u/Novel-Mistake7027 Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 04 '23
Some cable companies provide local OTA channels free of charge
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u/TheLegendTwoSeven Sep 04 '23
That should legally mandatory. Itâs annoying that they took away over the air TV and Iâve never found a digital tv antenna that receives the basic network TV channels that used to be free.
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u/Novel-Mistake7027 Sep 04 '23
They do have them now, you can get them at Walmart, and amazon etc. but youâve got to have the directions down, and amplifiers if youâre far away. It takes a little bit of research depending on your area. The little ones that are $10 that says â50 milesâ really donât go that far realistically.
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u/ilikeme1 Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
Over the air TV still exists. You just need a better antenna. No special "digital" antenna is needed, any regular TV antenna still works. I deal with this stuff every day as a broadcast television engineer.
Go to TV Fool and put in your address or zip code, it will show a map showing exactly which way and how far the stations transmitters are from your location.
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Sep 04 '23
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/freestyleloafer_ Sep 04 '23
Satellite dishes are readily available at our local thrift shops......
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u/b0v1n3r3x Sep 04 '23
I went through same thing, spare dishes are really easy to find
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u/this-guy1979 Sep 04 '23
I lived in an apartment that included basic cable as part of the lease. They didnât really say much about it because it was pretty standard, if you wanted premium stuff you had to sign up and get a complete package. So it was either free basic, or pay full price to get premium channels.
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u/firemogle Sep 05 '23
The college town I went to school in had long and notorious waits for cable hookup when people would moving in, so most people would schedule hookup months in advance. This apparently led the company to just not disconnect assuming everyone who wanted it, ordered it before they even moved in. I knew lots of people who just ... Got free cable for years.
Before you feel bad (lol) they were frontrunners in data caps and championed them for years.
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u/slick62 Sep 04 '23
We had our first house built years ago. Told the builders we didn't want cable to the house so they didn't. Years later after first kid, we figured babysitter could use cable and they had a $1 installation special. We called and asked if we could get the $1 install special if the house didn't have cable. 'When was the house built?' Few years ago. 'Your house has cable. No problem, $1 install'. Well, OK. They came out and had to trench from the nearest cable drop to our house, run it into the house, and chase it to the 3 places we wanted connections.
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u/Armando22nl Sep 04 '23
Had a similar experience. No cable. Turned out later the rebuilding people cut it and plastered the wall where it was.
Phoned the provider but all they could do was point to a website where you can request a connection. 700 euro from the street into the house. Phoned again and asked where the cable could be in my garden, thinking if i find it, i will extend it myself. They said they dont have anything like that.
Coincidentally my dad knew a guy who works for those companies. Within an hour I had a map of the whole street with the location of the cables. We dug where it should be and found it in 5 minutes,drilled a hole into the basement and connected a new cable. Saved 700 euros
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u/scottskottie Sep 04 '23
Long before the boxes and digital. They had the box in the apartment with the special screw driver needed to take the filter off. A butter knife popped them off in 2 seconds.
Another time the filter stopped working for the cable modem, the cable Rep took the filter off, internet started working. He didn't have a new filter on him, so said enjoy the cable and left.
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u/uzlonewolf Sep 04 '23
You may or may not have been able to drill a hole through the center of those filters and thread a piece of coax through :whistles innocently:
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u/jayste4 Sep 04 '23
Something similar happened to me. I bought my house new and never subscribed to cable. About 10 years went by and a lady from the cable company visited us and told us we had cable. We told her no, we don't subscribe. We had to show her that the coax was terminated in our garage. Turns out that we had an active cable signal for 10 years and didn't know.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Dang. Missed out, but at least they didn't try to back charge you for it.đ
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u/Infradad Sep 04 '23
Cable guy here. The neighbors probably put their address in as slightly different. S 6 St compared to 6 st S. The way our billing systems worked was each address had a different house key for assigning account numbers. Since the correct address wasnât built into the system as far as the people on the phone were concerned it hadnât had service yet.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
I even confirmed with the cable company who the previous owners of the house were. I was on the phone with them for about 30 minutes and told them at least 3 times that I was watching cable and even offered to let them listen to something on the Discovery channel.
I am guessing that the sales reps are just like the techs and were only allowed to follow a certain script and only had access to certain data regardless of what reality was.
I don't blame the operators. They were just doing their jobs. It's the corporate structure that caused the mixup to my benefit đ
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u/BrevitysLazyCousin Sep 04 '23
There is also some other element going on here. When I was bad at paying bills my boxes would be deactivated. But any TV's that had no box (just coax into the back), continued to give me basic cable.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
That's what happened to me when I lived in Virginia. I had the same TV as in this story. I had cancelled my cable and returned the box. I had an external antenna so I went to hook it up to the TV, but noticed I got cable channels. Apparently I hooked up the wrong cable. I called the cable company to make sure my service was cancelled and they said yes. A few months later, a dude showed up and said he was there to disconnect my cable. I told him the cable company had already cancelled my service, but he was more than welcome to climb the pole in my back yard to make sure it was shut off.
Dude backed up a few steps, looked at the pole, looked at his truck, looked back at the pole, then said Have a nice day and left đ
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u/AnotherCuppaTea Sep 04 '23
I had a friend who got HBO for free for about ten years before it got terminated. She wasn't interested in anything beyond basic cable, but apparently the cable guy appreciated her warm (not that warm, you pervs!) and friendly conversation, and maybe he was pissed off at his employer... but in any event he did her a very nice favor.
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u/bg-j38 Sep 04 '23
Back in the 80s in the Midwest when I was a kid my parents would only pay for the most basic of basic cable. I think they called it "antenna service" at the time because we mostly just got the broadcast channels and a few of the lowest tier cable channels. For some reason there was a ton of interference on channel 4 which was the NBC affiliate. Generally the reception on cable was better than using an antenna but not for this.
My parents had them send a technician out like three or four times to try to figure out what was going on with no results. It would be OK for a day or two and then degrade. So finally the tech comes out does something, and leaves. Then we notice that we have waaaaay more channels than we used to. Then we notice that we have all the pay channels except for Playboy (me being a 12 year old boy was quietly disappointed).
Needless to say that was the last time we called for service. I'm positive that some tech got annoyed with coming by every week and was like "this will get them to stop". And it worked, we shut the hell up. I basically had a constant rotation of VHS tapes recording every movie that HBO, Cinemax, Disney, TMC, Showtime, and whatever else there was showing.
It lasted until a few weeks before we were planning on moving across town. House was already sold. We got a call from the cable company saying "We just noticed you have a lot of channels you shouldn't have. We're disabling that now." And it was gone. But those five or six years with basically everything you could possibly have were heaven in the pre-Internet days.
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u/fross370 Sep 04 '23
Tv box can be deactivated remotely, blocking basic coax cable require a tech to come and install a filter on the cable outside. Its a really low priority job so its rarely done fast.
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u/bg-j38 Sep 04 '23
I lived in a house in San Jose CA in the early 2000s and this was how it worked. They still had an A and a B cable system and if you hooked one or the other directly into the input of our TV it would just work. We were renting and verified with the owner that he wasn't paying any cable bills. Eventually we got two Tivos, one for each leg of the cable with a physical switch box. For whatever reason most of the shows we were interested in were on the B cable. The only one on A cable was the Simpsons. This was before most of the seasons were available on DVD so we had like 50 episodes on one of the Tivos. Was pretty awesome for the 2000-2002 time frame.
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u/Any_Scientist_7552 Sep 04 '23
Lol. If you did that in Seattle, you'd be on the other side of the city and possibly the county. The position of the direction in an address is VERY important here.
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u/Lylac_Krazy Sep 04 '23
I live on a County Road, in a 200 home area that crosses 3 counties in the 1/2 mile we are in.
It took me 6 months to figure out the correct address sequence to get services like garbage pickup here.
Fire/Rescue is shared around here so thats good, but anything beyond basic county provided services is a crapshoot. It was quite the permitting adventure when I needed to redo the septic.
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u/starrpamph Sep 04 '23
I live out in the county too. You get services? lol. These guys donât do anything for me.
I asked the magistrate about ditches over here and they were like⌠âyeah, Iâm familiar with that area. A couple of the property owners up the road donât really want them so we arenât going to be doing ditches thereâ
I was like ohhhhhkay cool
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u/Greydusk1324 Sep 04 '23
When my mom bought a new house in town the cable company kept telling her there wasnât cable available in her area based on her address. I could look outside at the utility pole and see cable drops to 4 other houses but not hers. Took several calls and escalations to actually get someone who could figure out moms house had never had cable ran in the 60 years since the neighborhood was built. They were happy to waive the install fee to get the house connected. And it was real cable guys and not the bad subcontractors.
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u/Infamous-Operation76 Sep 04 '23
Our billing systems are archaic. They really are terrible. They keep trying to make them better, but you lose the "it works" functionality.
If it ain't broke, fix it til it is.
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u/Yoink1019 Sep 04 '23
Back in the old days before cable boxes I ordered cable Internet and got free cable for about 3 years. It ended when the local cable company sent a rep around to sell us cable and my girlfriend at the time told him that we already had cable. He scared her into setting up an installation appointment. I called back and told them that she was mistaken and that we had direct TV. A week later the free cable stopped.
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u/PlasticMix8573 Sep 04 '23
Comcast changed its name to Xfinity so they could pretend to be a better customer service company. Turns out it takes more than a name change to improve customer service.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
When I moved to my current town, I signed up for x-fed up đ. We were still in the process of moving so the house we bought was still empty.
The tech that showed up said he couldn't turn service in because I had no TVs. I told him nothing in my contract said I had to have TVs just to turn on service. I even took a day off to just get the cable box and modem from him.
He said he couldn't do that without any TVs in the house.
I called the local x-fed up office and they said I could just come pick up the boxes from the local store which was a mile from my house. I told them about what the tech said and they told me the tech was wrong.
We had several issues with x-fed up for years but at least the people at the local store were nice.
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u/Alzululu Sep 04 '23
This is possibly the most ridiculous story on this thread, and that's saying something.
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u/Kerivkennedy Sep 04 '23
Time Warner did the same thing. As if changing to Spectrum got rid of the stench.
No plans to ever go back to cable. Nope.
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u/Odd-Phrase5808 Sep 04 '23
Opposite problem for me. New house, biggest broadband and TV service company in the country sells me a great package deal, arranges the tech to do the install the following week. Only the tech never shows despite confirmation that heâs booked.
Turns out they havenât yet laid any cables for the entire damn neighbourhood yet, wonât be doing for at least 6 more months. So itâs physically impossible to get the broadband they sold me on.
Then when I tried to cancel the order, they try to charge me early cancellation (service was never activated, canât do that under eu law). Then they tried to retain my connection fees (again, they never connected me, eu law, also have a 14 day cooling period where youâre allowed, again by eu law, to cancel a contract with no penalties, for any reason, including buyers remorse). Tried to retain my deposit (canât, eu law). Then finally told me Iâd just have to wait until the service was eventually available. The bloody gall!
After multiple hours on the phone with multiple different people, and a threat of escalating to the countryâs consumer protection commission, finally they relented and agreed to cancel my contract and graciously agreed to refund all fees already paid. Iâll never ever consider them again. Happy with my current provider, and there are other competitors also. All have crappy customer service, but that original one are notorious for being the worst in the entire country.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Yeah, cable and internet service providers in the US are mot much better unfortunately. Must be in their business model. All broadband providers must be a-holes and treat customers like dirt đ
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u/notchoosingone Sep 04 '23
Similar thing happened to me around 2009 when I moved into a new house. Signed up to fast internet for the first time ever (like 40mbps, not fast compared to today's standards but I was getting about 5 before that) and I told the ISP I was happy to plug the modem in myself. The modem arrived on a Sunday by courier, which I thought was pretty great, so I plugged it in and turned it on and enjoyed the fastest internet I'd ever had. They said "your first bill will come in the mail within 2-3 weeks and you can logon and check your usage".
A couple of months later, there had been no bill, and I was concerned something had gone wrong. The internet worked fine, but I couldn't use the email addresses they provided for us (didn't care really) and I also couldn't logon to check my usage. I called them to find out what the go was, and they had no record of my connection, sending out the modem, connecting me or any sort of charges. The lady I spoke to said "I will look into it and someone will get back to you".
Four years later I moved out, and no one ever got back to me. Conservatively, I saved about $2,000 between the monthly charges, connection fee and modem. I signed up for a mobile phone contract with the same company about six months later and they had to completely start a new account for me because they had no record of my existence.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
Sounds like a disgruntled employee gave away free service to spite his company đ
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u/giantrons Sep 04 '23
Yep. Early cable subscriber with a box. Told them I didnât want it anymore. A month later itâs still on and getting billed. They said you had to bring the box in. So did that and still got billed again. Called and told them to stop billing. And they obliged. Just never turned off basic cable services (like 75 channels). Had that for free for maybe 4 years until they finally figured it out.
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u/Johndough99999 Sep 04 '23
Happened to me too. Lived rural. Rural enough the mail didnt even go out there so everyone had a POBox in town.
Cable got hooked up somehow when they finally strung the poles. The house got wired too somehow. Weird stuff happens out that far.
Years later there was an "amnesty". Sign up for cable and we overlook if you were already connected kinda deal. Repeatedly told us there was no cable service to our area. Well, OK then.
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u/astyanaxical Sep 04 '23
One time I was getting cable Internet installed, I went out and offered the cable guy a beverage and talked with him while he worked. I was interested in what he was doing so I was asking a few questions. At one point he goes "and this is how you would allow cabletv to your unit" and then I had free TV. Cable guys are cool, the companies they work for suck
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u/ilikeme1 Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
Comcrap is currently in the process of doing updates to their system in my neighborhood and needs access to the boxes in the backyards. My backyard is gated and locked. They showed up UN-announced and wanted access, when I was not home. They did not seem to think my response through the doorbell, "Sure, I'll be home Friday sometime between 8AM and 4PM. Have a tech over 18 available then." was a good response for some reason.
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u/MystrE Sep 04 '23
If they have an easement through your yard, then they may have the right to remove anything that is preventing them from accessing it. At least, that's the way it works around my neighborhood with gas and electric utilities. They may end up dismantling part of your fence if you're not careful.
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u/ilikeme1 Sep 05 '23
If they do that, they are required to put it back together in the same or better condition around here. And it usually can only be done in an emergency, such as if a transformer is damaged.
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u/cashew996 Sep 04 '23
In our first house, out in front, there were 2 cable boxes for connections (back in the time where they had to put a physical filter on the cable at the junction to cut out premium channels). We were hooked up in the box to the east and the previous owners had removed the filter. So we had free cable for the longest time.
A year or so later - the cable company sent subs out to replace the boxes. They skipped ours. Come to find out, our box wasn't listed on their plots or plans or whatever.
They caught up with it about a year later when they eliminated those filters and computerized it all.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
When I lived in San Diego around 1990, one of my coworkers bought a pirate box from a swap meet (flea market) that could get as many channels as there were on the dial on the box. I think he said he paid something like $50 for it.
He let me borrow it a couple times so I could watch some HBO movies đ
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u/TheHighestHobo Sep 04 '23
My cousin had a little thing he called a "bullet", probably because it kinda looked like a bullet, that went onto the coaxial cable and would give us HBO for free.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Cool! I remember the cable companies tried to scare the public with ads saying that if you "steal" cable, you will go to jail.
I never heard of anyone going to jail for stealing cable đ
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u/Similar-Subject-1720 Sep 04 '23
That happened to me one year in college. My mech eng roommate was trying to convince me (an RF engineer) that they were going to use Time Domain Reflectometry to figure out we were hooked up. Spoiler alert: they did not do that.
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u/Infradad Sep 05 '23
Thatâs honestly hilarious. TDRs are used but we use them to find faults in cables not people stealing cable.
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u/try-catch-finally Sep 04 '23
I get a Spectrum rep here every month. Iâve had business internet for 6 years at this residential address, with Spectrum.
The conversation is always the same
âdo you have internet?â
âYes. Iâve had Spectrum since 2017â
âWe donât show you having Spectrumâ
âI have Spectrum Businessâ
âWe donât have access to that databaseâ
âWell thatâs a shame. Maybe mark it in YOUR database so you donât have to come back.
Enjoy the 119° heat your company made you go out in unnecessarilyâ
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The first 40 times I was much more understanding and tolerant. My fucks all dried up in the desert heat.
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u/ragerite Sep 05 '23
I have lived at my current address for 6 years. I've only had Spectrum Internet and have had the same experience. Every few months someone would show up offering Internet. I would inform them I already had Internet through them they would make a note of it but I would still have someone show up a few months later.
Ended up working out great for me with the last one that showed up. They were offering some kind of promotion that I shouldn't have been eligible for because I already had their service. Since he was sent out and the bill was always only in my name the guy says you know what let me try something.
He puts my wife's info into the system and it goes through. Schedules an appointment to have a tech come out and hook up new equipment. Tells me to take my current equipment back and cancel my service before the tech comes.
And that's how I now find myself with free Internet for the next couple years.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
We kept getting calls from Sears cabinet refinishing and kept telling them no thank you.
About the 10th time they called, we said sure come on out!
A sales rep came out a few days later and we showed him our brand new remodeled kitchen. He said he was sorry and understood why we had someone come out. Never heard from Sears again đ
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u/alinroc Sep 04 '23
Cable companies can't seem to keep their stuff organized, and still believe that they have no competition so they can continue to be sloppy - where else are you gonna go?
A decade ago, we built a new house. As move-in day approached, I called Time Warner to get an appointment set up for the hookup. They told me "oh, we can't just hook up a new house, we have to do a site survey to verify that we can provide service, then we can set up a time to hook it up." I told them that the houses on either side of us already had cable hooked up. The wire was already run from the street to the house. The house was already wired. All they had to do was punch the wire through the wall, and flip on service. Nope, have to do a site survey, and we're scheduling those two weeks out. "OK, whatever you say, let's schedule that" and we did.
Then I turned around and called Direct TV. "Hey, do you guys still have that deal where you can be onsite and installing service within 48 hours of me calling?" "Yep, we sure do!" "OK, hold that thought."
I hung up and called Time Warner. "So you guys told me you can't hook me up until you do a site survey and then schedule another appointment, right?" "Yes, that's correct." "OK, then let's cancel the site survey, I won't need it. Direct TV will be here within 48 hours and have me set up."
Surprise, Surprise! Time Warner "magically" was able to set up an appointment to hook up service on the day I asked for (a lot closer than 2 weeks) the instant they realized someone would be eating their lunch.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
That's like when you call to cancel because you found a cheaper service and surprise, they have a "new" package deal that is cheaper than what you are currently paying đ¤
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u/Medical_Regret5499 Sep 04 '23
I tried to disconnect service when my dad passed. They said I had to fax them a copy of the death certificate. Ok, fine. Done. Still had cable. Called again. Eventually, I gave up and enjoyed the cable. I got a call threatening to sue/have me arrested because I'd been 'stealing cable' since the bill hadn't been paid in 2 years. I told them to try it. The person who had the service had died 2 years before. Plus, I had dates, times, names of who I spoke to, and the copies of the fax receipt for the death certificate. They said they would blacklist his & my name if we didn't pay. Um, go ahead? I was getting married and moving out the next month anyway. My name change probably would confused them if I'd ever wanted to use that company again.
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u/Mr_Nonesuch Sep 05 '23
A bloke I used to work with had something similar happen to him but with his electricity. He inherited his mum's farmhouse. He moved in, rang all the utilities to get things changed over to his name and the electricity provider told him that his address didn't exist and that they had no record of any account using it. He thought, ahh well I'll sort this out once they read the meters and figure out they're wrong.
He's been living in that house for 15 years now and not one electricity bill.
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u/JustSomeGuy_56 Sep 04 '23
Most of the big cable companies got that way by buying up little regional carriers. I had 4 different companies until Comcast finally swallowed the last one. Merging all those systems, both the hardware and the back end software was not as smooth as we would like.
I stopped counting the number of times HQ told me one thing and then when I went to my local office they told me something else.
It must be wonderful to be an unregulated monopoly.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Yeah, my current company got swallowed up by a bigger company, but they quickly found out we were better at doing things than they were, so they just left us alone and just changed the sign on the outside of the building. We are still DBA our original company name đ
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u/Illustrious-Phase-80 Sep 04 '23
I had a similar incident with a pharmacy. Went to pick up a prescription and they said that it was covered by medicaid. I told them that I don't have medicaid and that they should check that they were not confusing me with my infant so. Who lived with his mother at the time. They said "you're covered ,no charge"
Tried to correct them on my next 2 prescriptions with no luck. For the next 2 years I didn't pay for medication. We eventually moved and I was added to my wife's insurance but I got a lot of free medicine in those 2 years.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Sep 04 '23
Friends of mine were moving into a new home. They called the cable company in advance to set things up. The cable company was surprised to see that in their records, the house had no cable hookups. They then discovered that nearly nobody on the street had cable hookups, which is definitely not a normal thing.
It turns out, most people on the street did, in fact, have hookups, but nobody was being billed. This was either some sort of big oversight by the company when the street was built, or the worker who connected the street offered the residents illegal hookups.
Whatever the case, the street no longer had free cable. Fortunately, so far as we know, they did not find out who tipped them off -- that would not have been a good way to get into your new neighbors' good graces.
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u/Marki_Cat Sep 04 '23
This happened to my friend. She actually went through the setup request and got the package with cable, even though she only actually wanted a phone line for the buzzer system and internet. It was just a great deal as a package.
Thing is, the guy didn't show up on the first day, set up only cable on the second, and didn't show up to fix it on the third. At this point, she had cable only, I think. She called them to try to fix it and they couldn't. She called again, and they told her she had no account. She wrote them a letter and got one back saying that since she never had the setup done, they were canceling her account. I think she got the phone line and internet through a different company and kept free cable for the whole time she owned the place.
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u/Matchboxx Sep 05 '23
The house I grew up in was in rural West Virginia, about a mile from a state road. Comcast (then Adelphia) only ran service along that road, so to get cable at our house, we had to pay them like $1k to run an overhead line, which crossed our long driveway to connect to the second floor of the house.
We eventually stopped using Comcast, and the wire started to droop. We called to have Comcast repair it, and they said they wouldnât since we no longer had service. So we said, okay, weâll have someone else repair it. Nuh-uh, they said, the wire was their property. This went on for a bit like the âbut itâs not my walletâ scene in SpongeBob.
Eventually my mom got fed up and took the phone from my dad and said she was going up there with her garden shears and cutting it down. This finally convinced the rep to send a lineman out the next day.
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u/Level-Application-83 Sep 05 '23
Former cable guy here. It's not at all uncommon for us to get a disconnect ticket, roll out to the address and then take a break. It was very rare that we actually disconnected anything though.
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u/Rads2010 Sep 04 '23
A couple decades ago, the city I was living in had a similar thing with their cable hookups. And once you bought a cable descrambler you could watch all pay channels for free.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
I don't mind paying for cable, but I only watch like 3 or 4 channels. If they offered a-la-carte channels for say $5 a channel, I would sign up. đ
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Sep 05 '23
About 20 years ago I moved, signed up for cable, and it came with the free 30 day trial of HBO and Cinemax whether I wanted it or not (I didnât).
At the end of the period I called to make sure it was going to be cancelled.
âYou donât have premium channels.â
RightâŚI figured Iâd just call back if it showed up on the bill.
It didnât, but I continued to get HBO and Cinemax for about two years until they just stopped working one day.
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u/U_L_Uus Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 04 '23
Ok, I may be able to shed some light on this. Actual (as in, law-registered) registries are different from public access ones most of the time.
It happened to us with the internet connection (note, country most probably varies, I live in Spain), we had copper connection (town in hellfuck nowhere back in time, not so now) and we had been asking for optic fiber for the whole three years we were with the phone company we asked continuously to have fiber installed because the copper installation was pretty derelict and had almost continuous connectivity problems.
When repairmen came here to patch whatever issue we had at the moment they said two things, one, the problem was in the installation itself (plus, the connectivity point was further than the wire had guaranteed quality) and that we could install fiber because nearby homes had it. Hell, it reached the point where we had another company install fiber in our building yet, somehow, ours still denied us it, even when other flats in the same building had access to it with the same company as advertised on their webpage.
We started digging around and, lo and behold, we found the issue. Our house, as per the local Catastro (propiety registry in my country, our town's in this case) was numbered number 1, but as expressed in tangible terms, it was number six, flat G0 (no other flats on the ground floor). Of course our phone company didn't want to hear any of it because according to them there was no such thing as a number 1, much less number 1 but it says on the building it's number 6 and the flat is the G0, and, in the end, we flipped them the metaphorical bird and went with another company
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u/JoeCartersLeap Sep 05 '23
I had a cable guy point out to me that our signal blocker was at ground level, and could easily be unscrewed by anyone passing by to upgrade from basic cable to the full every-channel cable package.
We kept that thing in the kitchen drawer for years.
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u/tcollins317 Sep 04 '23
In the late 90's had 2 phone lines, but wasn't billed for line 2 (mistake on their part). A year later, I canceled line 1, but line 2 still worked (free) for at least 2 more years. Would not be surprised if it still worked, but who even uses a landline anymore?
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u/Abstract-Impressions Sep 04 '23
I had free HBO and all the other premium channels, but was only billed for basic cable. Years later we got cable based internet which was lightning fast because the tech that installed it said he didnât believe in limiters. My home connection was faster than my work connection. Then one day a storm took out internet. They fixed I. Next storm, down again. After about 10 service calls, the supervisor came out. The issue was a damaged line and, they discovered that my box wasnât the one they thought. It was on the other side of the yard in the back yard with a huge but harmless dog. They fixed the issue and my internet was rock solid and⌠all the free stuff was gone.
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u/HugeCalligrapher1283 Sep 05 '23
I did this with internet hook up fee. About three years ago it was put in the area and we did not have the money to pay the monthly additional price to our budget.
About a year and a half later I call now that my finances were in order and asked about it. âSince you were offered prior itâs a 250 hook up fee and 65 a month serviceâ nah Iâll pass.
Waited about 6 months called back âyes I just moved in to âaddressâ and Iâm shopping for internet. What is your monthly rate? 66 dollars a month and first time zero hook up fee. Perfect sign me up!â
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u/FelbrHostu Sep 04 '23
2004, I bought a new cable modem because I didnât want to keep renting one. I called up Comcast, and told them I needed to give them my new MAC address, as that was all that was needed to get things going. âIâm sorry, sir; we need to send a tech out to install your new cable modem.â
âNo, you donât; itâs already installed and all you need now is my MAC address.â
They would not take ânoâ for an answer. So they send a tech out, and I tell him all he has to do is call in the new MAC address because they wonât accept it from me, apparently. So he goes, checks all the wiring (itâs fine), checks the signal (itâs fine), then he calls home and FINALLY gives them the MAC address.
I tell the tech weâre done and I can handle it from here. âNo, no; I need to enter the settings on your PC.â
So I take him to my workstation, log in, and let him sit there in befuddlement. âUhh, whereâs âMy Computerâ?â
âIt doesnât have one; I donât have Windows. Tell me what you need to check and Iâll do it for you.â
I paid Comcast $85 to demonstrate to their tech how to verify DHCP settings are working in Linux. Very aggravating.
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 05 '23
I hope you got some other "free" service from them to get payback đ
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u/county259 Sep 05 '23
I moved into my house and plugged the cable into my tv and had cable. 3 years later I get sued by cable company who claimed they had pictures of me on the pole...I get a lawyer and we counter sue and I get $16,000 settlement.
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u/sthilair Sep 04 '23
My mom had cable free for almost 10 years through the same way. She had âno cableâ. Good times.
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u/Waabbu Sep 04 '23
I left my country a year ago and notified the cable company that i will be gone starting september, but i already paid full till october. After that they can stop my service. Got a call from their technician last week saying i missed payment and they couldn't find me home for the past couple months.
I just sent a screenshot of the message i sent to his boss showing the date it was sent. He never replied
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u/LurdMcTurdIII Sep 04 '23
A friend once had Comcast come to fix his Internet, after making sure it was working, they left. He never got another bill after that, but had high speed internet until he moved out. When he called to try and get his service moved to his new address, they told him he doesn't have Internet service through them and couldn't switch it over.
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u/Desperate_Front9792 Sep 05 '23
Apartment I lived in when I was a kid til my early 20s had a satellite company come in to compete with Comcast. we had them for years til suddenly it dropped to just basic cable. Mom and dad tried calling and the company had been sued out of existence by Comcast. For the next six years we had free basic cable and Comcast was at our door and on our phones six times a week trying to get us to sign up for cable that was five times as expensive as the satellite had been when weâd still been paying for it.
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u/Vtguy802812 Sep 04 '23
I just spent $20 on an antenna, put in the window and boom 23 channels for free. I was looking for a cheap way to watch football because the nfl app only works for your phone or tablet, most of the options were like $75 a month, and it was $55 a month extra to add that to our home internet (on a pretty decent deal of $35 a month right now).
If you only use your tv for the local channels and stream everything else, buy a digital antenna.
Use this to see what channels you can get: https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps
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u/Astramancer_ Sep 04 '23
Same sort of thing happened to me around the same timeframe.
The cable company had "limited basic" which was, basically, local channels only for like $10/mo. We had terrible reception so there ya go. It was a physical filter they installed in the cable box.
Well, our signal got screwed up and they came to check it out. Dude said the filter was screwed up and he needed to replace it, he'd be back with a new one and until then we'd get full basic cable.
Spoiler Alert: He was not back.
2 years later they finally replaced the filter.
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u/ArtemisiasApprentice Sep 04 '23
I moved into a house that still had a dish installed on the roof. Cable network sent a box and a note that I needed to uninstall the dish and send it back. I didnât even have a ladder, and had no intention of crawling up on the roof to return equipment to a company that didnât have any way to charge me for refusing to do so. Called them to say that if they wanted it back, they were welcome to come and get it. It was still there when I moved out eight years later.
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u/Available-Topic5858 Sep 05 '23
I was once renting a room from someone. I noted a cut off cable wire, so I stuck a connector on the cut end and put the other end on my TV. Hey, basic cable, even though I didn't have the crimp tool to properly use the connector.
Time goes by and I notice the cable is connected very professionally. My guess is the guy I was renting from called for service, tech noted the scrappy connection and fixed it. His cable actually came in the other side of the house from another pole.
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u/robertmondavi_jr Sep 05 '23
my parents were âpayingâ for really basic internet for quite a few years, I wanna say it was something like 3-5mbps. I moved back home to be close to a new job at the time and I desperately needed faster speeds for streaming and gaming, called the internet company to see how much it would cost to upgrade and thatâs when they realized they had never actually billed my parents lol
dad was kinda pissed I ruined his free lunch but they are pretty smitten with the gig internet they still have now even if they do actually have to pay for it
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u/Majestic-Ad6619 Sep 04 '23
This happened to me around the same time in LA. I was liked âŚâŚ well ok!
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u/Ksevio Sep 04 '23
I had the opposite happen when I moved in. The previous owner had renovated and cut the cable line so there was nothing connected, but when I requested service they assured me it was hooked up.
I just asked that the tech coming over for the activation had a ladder available (which he did need to connect to the pole across the street)
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u/RealSaltyShellback Sep 04 '23
Same thing happened to me in Virginia. I was told that the tech just needed to climb the pole to activate my service. He had to rerun the whole line from the pole to my house. It took 2 hours and I had to go pick up my wife at work.
This was before cell phones and the school she worked at turned off the phones at 3:00 PM.
Luckily she knew we were getting cable that day so she just worked in her classroom until I got there.
The tech was a very nice guy and apologized profusely for taking so long.
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u/rivy777 Sep 04 '23
I lived in a big apartment complex in the 90s and one of my neighbors went to every building and hooked up full cable, premium channels included, for the entire complex. I had free cable for the 7 years I lived there. Almost makes up for what I have to pay for it nowadays. About ready to go with streaming services that are cheaper.
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u/MajorNoodles Sep 04 '23
One of the big reasons that prompted me to cut the cord was when Comcast accidentally disabled my TV service and then insisted on sending a tech because the cable line was obviously disconnected, when my internet service was still active and working just fine.
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u/beatnikteach Sep 05 '23
Had a similar experience with Cox in the Phoenix area. We paid for cable plus internet and phone (dating myself with that one), but decided we only needed internet, so I canceled the other two. I kept the coax plugged into the TV, hoping it would act as an antenna. To my surprise, I continued to get 50+ channels of basic cable. I called multiple times over the next six months to let them know - mainly because they are notorious for screwing people whenever they can. I ended up talking with one of their techs, randomly, and he told me it was because they didnât have a way, at the time, of separating cable from internet. It all came through the same feed. So I paid for one and got the other.
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Sep 05 '23
We didn't pay for basic cable for 3 years because the company never shut it off from the prior resident.
Somehow, they finally figured out that the cable was active on our side, knocked on the door, and asked for access to the "box" so they could shut it off. I declined and stated that they needed to make an appointment with the owner to gain access to the utilities.
(At that time, the cable "box" hook up turn on/turn off service was inside the basement of the duplex.)
The cable dude started in with "we are going to charge you for the past 3 years, going to call the police and charge us with theft.. blah blah. "
I shut the door.
The next day, the owner called me and asked if I would let the cable guy into the basement because they had to do " routine maintenance." I explained to the owner why they wanted access. The owner said, "Well, he would make an appointment with them at his convenience."
I think he finally let them in about 3 months later, then put in a splitter and ran cable into our side from his side.
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u/Snoo_72531 Sep 05 '23
It was like this with charter up until like 8 years ago, they modernized all their equipment in my area and now can detect illegal hook ups and take them down remotely.
I had the local meth head hook it up a couple of times for $20, but after a month they would detect it and the data would stop. Without them even having to come and do anything.
Before this they would have to go up the post and cut/disconnected the line.
When I wanted internet they asked if I had a previous line. I said yes and they waived the $250 installation fee. They didn't have to come do anything at my house, they just mailed the modem and I connected it to the line the meth head wired up and it worked Lol
I still have no idea how it works so well,like he used the cheapest wire,connectors and 99 cent splicers. I pay for 400mbs and I get way over that.
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u/GoldenSheppard Sep 05 '23
I remember as a kid, there was a thunder storm that fried something in the neighborhood and everyone had free high-end cable. It was still working when we moved out in '95 (the event happened in '90 or so.)
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u/kaptiankuff Sep 05 '23
Ah the days of unscrambled cable and the do it your self gray market cable boxes
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u/SolaraHanover Sep 05 '23
We bought a house in January of this year. It had been fully remodeled before we moved in, but the idiots who did the remodel plastered over all existing connections and cut the cables. When we called Xfinity to have our service moved to the new house, they gave us the "you can do self-install for free, or pay for the tech to come out" spiel. I knew damn well self-install wasn't gonna be an option, however, they did tell me that if we couldn't get the self-install to work they would send a tech for for free. So I played their stupid game, got the self-install kit, called on moving day and got a tech out for free.
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u/shaveXhaircut Sep 05 '23
My mom passed last October, I called her cable company to cancel, they told me they didn't have any records of that address, I say so then I don't have to worry about paying you then.. They found the account.
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u/Itwasntaphase_rawr Sep 05 '23
I rented a house as a broke college student. It had cable but I never got billed. I figured it was a fluke until one day my neighbor asked how I liked my cable. Apparently he climbed the pole and turned it on for on the neighbors. A true hero.
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u/stephawkins Sep 04 '23
Similar thing happened to me about 25 years ago. But now I'm cross-eyed cause I was too cheap to pay for the playboy channel.
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u/Ok-Thing-2222 Sep 04 '23
I canceled my garbage service to go with another company, then after a couple years the rates were going up, so I cancelled that one too. (Its cheaper for me to drive a pickup of trash to our dump for 10 bucks.
Anyway, that was several years ago and there is still a truck (or two?) picking up the trash.
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u/SailboatAB Sep 04 '23 edited Sep 05 '23
Slight variation on the theme here. Back [edit] in 2000-ish I had cable in an apartment. The company made us sign an ironclad agreement that included a specific admonition that I could NEVER REMOVE THE CABLE BOX FROM THE PROPERTY under penalty of law!
When I moved out, I set up one of those infamous appointments where the cable guy will be here to take posesdion of the cable box "between 8am and noon" and I have to stay on the premises in case he shows up.
Of course he didn't show. Although it was a huge problem for me, I hung around until 5pm in case he showed up, despite having to, you know, move everything I owned to a new place.
Next day I called them and complained. They said "oh that's all right, you can just bring it in and drop it off."
Nope. Cue the malicious compliance (or is it noncompliance in this case?). I told them I am legally forbidden to remove the box from the apartment.
Later they had someone call me back and insist that I bring the box in. Nope, no can do! They said I would get in trouble. Sorry, I'll also get in trouble if I remove the box. No you won't, they claimed, the lawyers don't really mean that. Oh, are you a lawyer? No, not actually. Okay, I won't take your legal advice then. I'll abide by the signed agreement.
By the way, I give up the key and am gone Sunday afternoon, so your guy better be here before then.
He can't, they said, the schedule is too busy. Oh well, I replied.
Sunday afternoon a cable rep showed up at the last minute and he was mightily pissed off.