Charter's call centers are just that. Call centers. You call them. End of story. I find their automated woman more knowledgeable and pleasant than the live mouth breathers they have taking calls. Seriously, if you're lucky enough to get one you can understand, don't get excited. Most likely, they have no clue how to help you, nor do they really care to.

I've had Charter's services for several years. Not by choice, mind you. There is no other high speed internet provider in my area. I have to cut my losses and thank god for the days when I'm not struggling to surf the web or play my online games. I've placed many phone calls into their office, complaining about down services. It is common to suddenly be without service for several hours, or sometimes only certain webpages will load while others won't, etc.

Lately, I've been having really high latency issues while playing World of Warcraft. Despite my problems with Charter, I first turned to Blizzard to see if the problem could be with my game or with their servers. After a day or two of dialogue with tech support there, I had reset modem and router, flushed my dns, removed various files from my game folder, restarted WoW, etc. I kept a log of trace routes when my latency would spike. Usually I hover between 30 and 45ms in game. Now, I can jump to 300, the highest so far being over 6, 000ms. This makes the game unplayable.

So, upon Blizzard's request, I contacted Charter to see if we could rule out any ISP problems. Silly me, thinking I'd find help there. The first person I talked to told me to reset modem and router. When I explained I'd done this, they literally said, "Well, is there anything else I can help you with today, then?" I had a wtf moment and told them, no, never mind, I'd just call.

So I called and got some guy who I could barely understand. Still hopeful, I explained a bit as to what was going on. There was this really, really long pause. For a minute I thought I'd been disconnected, but he finally spoke and rambled on about resetting my modem and router. I told him, no, I wasn't going to do that because I already had--about a dozen times. I was calling because I wanted them to check for packet loss, line stability, and answer a few questions about the trace routes I had. He seemed not to understand, but put me on hold to 'check some things'. After a few minutes he came back and said everything was fine and that my computer must have a virus. I told him that was unlikely, seeing as my computer is a Mac and is protected (with firewall and antivirus). He got angry at me and insisted I had a virus and should be running in Safe Mode. Took me a minute to realize he meant Safe Boot, and I couldn't see what that would do to solve my bad internet problem. I asked him to explain why my trace routes were spiking on hop 13 and 14 consistently and he had no clue what to tell me, he didn't even try to answer, nor did he connect me to someone who could.

He was set that it was my computer, router, or Blizzard that was the problem. And that may very well be, but unless I rule out my ISP being an issue, I'll never know how, or even if, this problem can be fixed. I told him I wanted a tech sent to my home and he actually refused me at first. I couldn't believe it. He was angry like a petulant little boy and trying to get back at me by denying me tech support service. Finally, he relented and set up an appointment (which I'm skeptical they'll show). I asked him if this person will be able to answer my questions and he basically blew me off with a 'Sure, sure. Anything else I can help you with?"

How awful. Having worked for Service Master for nearly 10 years, customer support like this always appalls me. I know first hand what it's like to work for a company that has no interest in training or taking care of employees, but I never, ever took it out on my customers. Usually they were just like me, stuck in some sort of horrific limbo created by corporate greed and insolence. Also, I will give SM some credit though, if anyone had ever spoke to a customer the way this guy did to me, we would've been fired. It just goes to show you how horrible Charter really is--they don't care if they lose customers because of nasty, untrained, unhappy employees.

My father who does not own a computer noticed a charge on his Verizon phone bill for $14.95 plus tax from a service defined as "Resdnt1Email Mo Fee" billed on behalf of "Residential Email". When we contacted Verizon they informed us this was beyond their control. They said that they were forced to accept these charges from 3rd Parties. I find that hard to believe. They put us in touch with this company who said that this had been ordered by someone who's name was not at all familiar. Both companies had difficulty dealing with me because they said they needed to talk to someone who had authorization to make changes on the account. Are they kidding. The can charge for a service without authorization but they can not cancel the charge without authorization.
Residential Email agreed to apply a refund to the verizon account and and cancel the service account supposedly opened by someone else. They also said that there might be an additional charge since we were already in a second billing cycle and that I would have to call again to get that charge refunded. They sent the cancellation email to a mail I gave them. When I read the email it appeared to be a fake. I am very concerned.