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That was priceless

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I swear all of the online chat agents for every company are just a random dialog generator because a bunch of the transcript is almost identical to my chat experience today.

AT&T isn't any better. I argued with them for an hour before because they said my neighborhood didn't have Uverse. The guy I bought my house from had Uverse. My neighbors have Uverse. Yet it took an hour and a half to get to a person that could find my house in the Uverse system. I ended up calling some guy in Amarillo of all places to get my install done.

It took me FOUR HOURS on the phone with AT&T just to get them to remove the drop from the old building before I demolished it. "I'm just going to remove it myself and leave it dangling from the pole" finally did the trick.

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...Secondly, embrace the hate with AT&T and Comcast. And Time Warner. And DirecTV. And Dish. And Verizon. Make it a game. Stretch. Do a couple of pushups. Put your game face on. Then dial. I hate TW. Words cannot describe the animosity. But nobody could touch the deal they had on internet. So I reluctantly signed up, knowing full well what I was in for. And boy howdy, they did not disappoint.

Signed up. Told them specifically there was no cable to the house. Neighbor and I both have left-hand driveways. My utility connections are on my right side facing their driveway. TW pedestal is on opposite side of their driveway in front of their house. You can stand at one and hit the other with a crunched up beer can swinging underhand. But apparently, I don't know what I'm talking about.

They were nice enough to apologize for the "incontinence," though. Chat transcript is below.

The Adventures of UnderoosAg and Time Warner: One man. One question. Three reps. Two hours

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Good lord, that's a bigger disaster than Big Ben's Craigslist adventure.

I just waged war with Comcasf/Xfinity over the last 2 months. Went like this: no cable to house as previous owners ripped it out and had Dish. So tech comes in, nice guy, and does sort of a loopy install for my house because I wanted a drop in my garage. Signal is somewhat weak and nightly we lose picture but keep audio.
Call #2, new guy comes out and is scratching his head as to why tech 1 ran things the way he did which was an extra 50' of line. He fixes it, tests all the splitters and replaces 2. Says signal strength is good.

Same issue. Nightly. Or during the daytime when I happen to be watching football.

Call #3. Another new guy comes out, tests splitters, changes a few, says it's ok. I also ***** theY haven't buried the line and it's been over a month.

Same issues. Guy #3 says it's probably our box and we need to swap it out.

Guys come to bury the line, they damage my sprinkler system. We fix the broken ovc but now Zone 3 won't work, probably mud clogging the head.

A month later (we're busy working on our garage/brewery) we replace it. Worms fine, no issues. Day 2 (Sunday), pure snow and we do have audio. WTF, again. I call in, the review my history and say they'll send out a senior linesman, no charge. Got damn right no charge.

Yesterday, linesman comes out and she basically spends 5 minutes testing the whose wiring. Good to go. Then spends 40 minutes testing signal from post or whatever and signals are all over the place. Issue is with the neighborhood box. So she says, yuo, it's us, not you and books a different tech to come out to unscrew that. Which will result is service outage for everyone using that 'hood box.

So we shall see. This is the last straw, if it doesn't work I'm going to demand they release us from our year contract with no penalty and we will do something else. This whole process could have been faster but we didn't call in every time and it took us forever to swap the box out to eliminate all possibilities. I also own expensive all matching HDMI ca less because one tech said that could be the issue.

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I swear all of the online chat agents for every company are just a random dialog generator because a bunch of the transcript is almost identical to my chat experience today.

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I'm convinced they have on-screen buttons or hot keys to automatically dump in certain phrases. And it's entertaining to see just how much they are paying attention. TW, Comcast, etc., all the big boys are worthless. On one of several follow up chats to resolve the speed issue, I was sitting at home. Just chillin. With a double dirty martini, or three. I just started cutting and pasting and parroting their responses back to them.

TW monkey: Now, run speedtest again, and tell me the results.
UA: 27.
UA: I do not have any further information on this matter.
TWM: And you checked the connections? They are all tight?
UA: I think so. But it's all upstairs. And I'm downstairs in the recliner. And I'm probably drunk, so...
UA: I do not have any further information on this matter.
UA: These martinis are very important to me. They will be consumed in the order they were shaken. For more olives, press two.

If you really want to play, start dropping crazy slang, spell things fonetikallee, and keep asking direct questions. You'll figure out quickly if "Larry" is really "Larimandepanibabajov". Really sucks that we all have to fight thru such things for something as relatively simple as cable, phone, etc. But as my brother and I always say, "sometimes you gotta fight stupid with stupid."

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"I'm just going to remove it myself and leave it dangling from the pole" finally did the trick.

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My old boss had a cable thrown across his back yard when they repaired a neighbor's cable. He was patient for a few weeks, then finally arranged a gardening accident. It was tragic. There were pieces of weed, mulch, and coax all over the place. Threaten to cut it, or sometimes even better, channel your #WON'TSOMEBODYTHINKOFTHECHILDREN, and call it a safety concern. The conduit to my parent's meter was slipping and pulling from the meter can on the utility side, all stuff they own and maintain. He tried in vain via the generic customer service number to get them to come out and fix it, as it was starting to pull on their panel. He had to spell "conduit" for at least one of the reps. Finally I wrote out three sentences and told him to read them verbatim. He got as far as " exposed energized conductors", got transferred, and it was fixed that afternoon. #FSWS

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" exposed energized conductors"

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Full stop. That's an attention-getter right there.

All trades have final trim out tomorrow and final inspections on Monday
Hardware and low voltage trim out Thursday
Final paint and clean up on Friday

Final inspection next week.

Is it on HAR yet?

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Is it on HAR yet?

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I'm not a licensed member and I'm not using a broker.

Put it on Zillow, it will get picked up quickly.

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One, there is no accounting for taste. Had an architect once ask me to find him options on a lighting fixture. Found a few options in a catalog and sent them to him. Same page had one of the most God-awful things I've ever seen. It looked like a wacky combination of d-bag jeans, old coffee cans, and candy ring pops. And I'm not even joking. There's now a restaurant full of ring pop junk mounted e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. And they sell the **** outta food.

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RA Sushi?

It's not sealed yet, but you can clearly see how nice the epoxy floor looks.

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After the garage can they cover the wood floors next?

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I see my buddy's truck pulling that Epoxy trailer! Epoxy floors folks are good people, I can vouch for their exceptional work.

I'm pretty jealous over those floors. Looks awesome.

Curious, whats the junction box hanging on the wall?

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Curious, whats the junction box hanging on the wall?

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Water heater connection.

So who all's hanging out in your driveway today?

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So who all's hanging out in your driveway today?

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Hell if I know. All the trades have final inspections on Monday so probably plumbers, electricians, and HVAC at the least.

Just curious how much the epoxy in the garage ran you.

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Just curious how much the epoxy in the garage ran you.

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Just shy of $1700

I'm going to let those of you who called "jinx" gloat and say you told me so. My builder just isn't communicating with me at all at this point. It looks like his way of dealing with correcting problems I point out is to just ignore me or make someone else talk to me. I've demanded a meeting to address all of the issues and he is not responding, so we're at that point where I'm having a courier hand-deliver a demand letter to him.

I think it's really sad that we're so close to being done and he's chosen to just shut off and not deal with the project. Some work is being done sporadically, but some of it has not been done correctly. If I were him I would pull out all the stops to get it done and off the books to get the client off my ass.

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I'm going to let those of you who called "jinx" gloat and say you told me so. My builder just isn't communicating with me at all at this point. It looks like his way of dealing with correcting problems I point out is to just ignore me or make someone else talk to me. I've demanded a meeting to address all of the issues and he is not responding, so we're at that point where I'm having a courier hand-deliver a demand letter to him.

I think it's really sad that we're so close to being done and he's chosen to just shut off and not deal with the project. Some work is being done sporadically, but some of it has not been done correctly. If I were him I would pull out all the stops to get it done and off the books to get the client off my ass.

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But that's how you see it.

How he sees it as:

I'm done with this job, mostly. I am cutting into my profit margin with this, so instead, I'll go look at new work, which brings in more cash rather than deal with a mostly done project. I can ignore emails/phone calls. Until it is a lawyer/summons, you are back burner.



~egon

It's the 90/10 rule. It always is. He's a **** for ignoring you, but it's always all the little things at the end.

Having a courier deliver a printed copy of my last email to him got his attention. We have a meeting scheduled now and he's nailing down a completion date with his crew tomorrow.

I forget from the start of this thread but are you holding retainage? If so was it just not enough to get his attention prior to the couriered letter?

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I forget from the start of this thread but are you holding retainage? If so was it just not enough to get his attention prior to the couriered letter?

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Yes. It's lump sum retainage/punch list. It's not retainage from every invoice.

It's weird to me they wouldn't be more on top of that so they could get the cash and move on.

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It's weird to me they wouldn't be more on top of that so they could get the cash and move on.

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I suspect he has more jobs than he can handle right now. He's overextended and does not manage his subs well. Those are not a good combination.

The good news is we did a walk-through today and I laid out all my concerns about communication and avoidable mistakes. For example, we shouldn't be relocating a light switch at this stage, or installing the wrong thermostat and door hardware. All these mistakes result in crews having to come back and that costs someone time and/or money.

We also had a very direct conversation about him telling me it was good to rent on March 1st and that not happening because of mistakes and his subs not sticking to a schedule. He also got a good lesson in making sure his subs pay attention because some hardware disappeared. It probably got thrown away by mistake, but now he has to go buy replacements.

After he left, his client specialist (the one who tells them what to buy and when and how to make selections) told me that having a message delivered by courier telling him I'm about to explore my options got his attention. All of the final inspections are scheduled with the City and completion is scheduled for a week from today.

Awesome! let us see some pics, we're dying over here!