Absurdity
Cable Company Mandates 8-Hour Window for Technician to Show Up and Leave
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
Tri-State Cable Solutions announced Tuesday that all residential service appointments will require customers to remain present and available for a full eight-hour window, during which a technician may arrive, perform a task describable in under ninety seconds, and leave.
The policy, which has been company standard since 2019 but was formalized in a customer agreement update this week, applies to all service categories including "signal check," "remote reboot," and "confirming the TV is plugged in," which accounts for, according to internal estimates Tri-State has not disputed, roughly 34 percent of all dispatched visits.
"We want to give our technicians the flexibility they need to serve you as efficiently as possible," said Tri-State Vice President of Customer Experience Donna Phelp, reading from a laminated card. "The eight-hour window is not an inconvenience. It is a commitment. To you. From us. That we will be there."
She paused, then added: "Somewhere in there."
Customers who miss the technician because they stepped outside to retrieve mail, accepted a package, or briefly ceased to exist in the front half of their home will be rescheduled for the next available appointment, which Tri-State's online portal currently lists as February.
Kevin Sarno, 41, of Millbrook Heights, took a full vacation day from his job as a logistics coordinator, made lunch at home, and waited. The technician, a man named Dale, arrived at 3:52 p.m., looked at the cable box, said "yeah," replaced a coaxial fitting, and was back in his van by 3:56.
"I asked Dale if he needed anything else," Sarno said. "He said no. I said, 'Do you want to come in?' He said he was good. Then he left. I still had four minutes of window left and I just stood there."
Sarno has since been rescheduled, because the fitting Dale replaced was the wrong gauge.
Tri-State's scheduling algorithm, developed in 2014 by a contractor who has since left the industry and moved to Portugal, does not allow windows shorter than eight hours on the grounds that "technician routing is a dynamic process subject to real-time conditions," which the company defines as traffic, other customers, and what Phelp described in a 2022 internal memo as "Dale being Dale."
The company does offer a Premium Scheduling tier for $34.99 per month, which reduces the window to six hours and includes a text message sent sometime during the window that says "on the way" without specifying from where.
For $59.99 per month, customers receive the Concierge Experience, which is the same as Premium Scheduling but the text message uses an exclamation point.
Civil rights attorney and part-time cable subscriber Marcus Ohill filed a complaint with the state Public Utilities Commission last Thursday, arguing that requiring a working adult to surrender an entire business day for a task the company's own literature describes as "minor" constitutes an abuse of the customer relationship.
The Commission acknowledged receipt of the complaint and informed Ohill that a review would be completed within six to eight weeks, pending staff availability, during which time he should remain reachable.
Tri-State closed its fourth quarter with a customer satisfaction rating of 2.1 out of 5, which the company described in its annual report as "an area of exciting opportunity."
Dale was not available for comment. His dispatcher said he was somewhere between a job in Ferndale and his lunch break, and that they expected him to surface sometime this afternoon.
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