For a long time my friends and I have all had Optimum (formerly Cablevision).  I liked Optimum, the services were OK as far as cable companies went and the uptime was nearly 100%.

Then DirecTV entered my life and I never looked back on the coaxial bearing monstrosity that is Optimum.  Yesterday my third box from DirecTV came completing my installation of satellite and my exodus from cable.

I contacted Optimum’s cancellation department where I was told by a representative that I am both stupid and making bad choices in my life (wow he really knows me!).  So I opined that I am the customer and I know what I want.  My decision is arbitrary and based purely on a friend’s recommendation of satellite to me.

The representative informed me I could keep one box, keep the triple package and only pay ten dollars for the box that I won’t be using any time soon.  I scoffed at that idea and told him how puerile and stupid that sounded.  He began to berate me, asking me why I would want to lose the fastest Internet speeds in NY and NJ and if I’d been drinking (btw, I asked I’m to disconnect television not Internet, so why he mentioned speed is beyond me).  I told him yes and hung up.

I called back where I got a Hispanic woman who told me much of the same but instructed me that she could not (or would not?) cancel my service for television until I told her why.  I told her I didn’t have to provide her with a reason and that my request was simply to disconnect the service related only to the television.

She told me she had to go, put me on a muzak hold for three minutes and came back telling me her supervisor would not let her terminate the services without an explanation of why.  I told her I was not going to give her one and she’d have to sit on a tack (I didn’t say that, you’ll have to fill in the Ps and Qs of what might have actually been said).

She began to berate me.  Telling me that no one makes stupid choices like me and that I must be crazy.  She chided me for using DirecTV telling me the dish will probably fall off my house and cause damage to my roof.  The real bridge burner was when she insisted that I must be mentally ill and was an ass for wanting to terminate.

We got into a heated exchange of words ultimately leading in her terminating the television service as I asked and me writing a letter to CEO of Optimum James Dolan.

Flash forward to today when I arrived home at four thirty to find my Internet behind what’s colloquially known as a walled garden (meaning the physical address of your modem on their network has been placed on a temporary network which has no access to the physical Internet – the thing you’re reading this on).  I picked up the phone to call Optimum only to find the telephone was not working either.

Frustrated, I called on my cell phone to Optimum’s Executive Response Center that’d called me a day earlier .  I waited 45 minutes while a man who was very helpful and sympathetic and OBVIOUSLY trying to avoid a blog post like this being written diligently got me service back up.  His response verbatim was: “I am being as forthcoming as I can be with you, the problem was an error on our end and should never have happened”

The bottom-line of this story?  Coaxial cable providers are a dinosaur.  As pressure mounts from industry leaders like FIOS, NetFlix and even Satellite these giant behemoths who resisted DVR systems, phone apps and online television viewing are now struggling to keep up.

That being said – I have to admit I was pretty shocked to come home today to see my Internet and phone services cut.  This was a hilariously mature decision of an Optimum employee and the fact that disconnecting a persons Internet/phone service is so easy speaks volumes to how much the company has to do to catch-up with the times.