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charter communications. The past few weeks, my cable internet has been sucking pretty badly. So I've tried calling into their tech support a few times. First time I jumped through some hoops and finally got a person on the line. After giving my name, the phone number on the account, and my address (and declining to give my social security number over the phone), i get this "I understand you are having internet troubles today. I would like to commend you on selecting our 3 meg internet package as this is our most popular package if you would like to hear about our other offers or to know about our current..." 'Sir' ".. rates we will be happy to talk ..." 'Sir' " .. about our current offerings that are more than..." 'Would you please listen to me? All I want to know is if there is an outage in my area' "ok. what's your social?" 'I don't feel comfortable giving that over the phone' "um.. umm." [5 minutes later] "hello? ok yes we are having an outage in that area." 'Ok. Is there an estimated time it's going to be back?' "um. 10 pm" (that's 7 hours away at this point) 'Ok, fine. Is there someone who I can talk to about being refunded for the time I've lost?' "um. oh. yes, bla bla bla bla something yes, ok, I'll transfer you to someone who can help you" [disconnected]

guy hung up on me and didn't help me. I really don't have any idea what this guy was thinking. wait, no, I don't have any idea what charter was thinking. why would they ever think that this was an acceptable way to deal with a customer? Here's my point

When a company becomes a monopoly, they don't have to give a flying crap about any single one of their customers. The only thing that will take their business away is some freak change in the industry of whatever they are peddling. Can monopolies be good? Most people will freak out and say "all monopolies have to be the devil, everyone who works there hates the world and the environment" not true. if a monopoly became a monopoly without the government making a deal to get them there, then it would have to have pleased people millions of times and kept doing that or everyone would jump ship. what really happens is some retard makes a deal with another retard and BAM, we all have crappy cable, for a crappy price, with terrible support and they could care less. Who just won? The cable company and the government. So why can't we have this? well. we're already really screwed from all the crap flying around. You would take away peoples' job and everyone would get all fussy and blame you instead of their inability to get a new job. just how stupid big companies complain when you tell them they are destroying the world and they'll have to spend an extra .01$/part to fix it. Man, whatever happened to making a fair profit from something instead of always ruining things just to help your bottom-line.

This will be my first in a series I'd like to call free-market-fridays.

this concludes my first week.