The Breakdown  

FYI:  The Breakdown is off the air now due to the wonderful decision by Time Warner Cable to disconnect my cable service without notice and for no apparent reason.  They have been unable to tell me the reason my service was turned off, so I have been calling them for several days, scheduling appointments, and talking to every minimum wage malcontent that works for their customer disservice division, to no avail.  The appointments that they tell me they are scheduling mysteriously disappear from their schedule within 24 hours and the record of the calls I have been making keep getting wiped. 

The dishonesty and omissions by the customer service staff suggest that they are hiding something.  It's most likely something stupid that someone did somewhere along the line and everyone else is covering to keep their particular organization from getting in trouble.  Time Warner, of course, outsources most of it's labor to third-party contractors, who get paid not by the quality of their work, but by the speed with which they get it done. 

I know this because I once worked for call-center disaster Sitel Corp.  as a technical support specialist for Cox Communcations.  For two years I sat on the phone and lied to people all over the country.  I told them to reinstall their operating systems while I knew for a fact there was a router or node acting up and it would take a week or two before they were back online.  I played dumb when Mac users called to complain that their hard drive was corrupted by our software, knowing all the while that we were sending out defective software CD's that could potentially turn an iMac into nothing more than a colorful doorstop.  All of this was done according to company policy.  After two promotions, I was eventually fired from this job due to a string of heated arguments I had with management over the waning quality of the customer service we provided.

I am currently waiting to hear back from Time Warner's corporate office.  I'm not holding my breath.  My next show will feature them, I'm sure.  That's IF I ever get my internet back.