My telephone and internet service provieder is totally amateur. I contact them with an issue (old broken cable outside my property causing a noisy line rendering the internet unstable and the phone impossible to use), carefully explaining the diagnostic procedure followed as reccomended by thier own help guide which allowed me to come to the conclusion - according to both thier and the engineering company they use for repairs the natue and location of the fault should entitle me to a free of charge repair. In reply they simply send me a list of diagnositc steps that you have to go through in order to actually get to the contact detals page, and a warning that they may charge me anyway, clearly contradicting all information presented about payment charges to this point. The best bit is that they want me to all thier engineering department using the line they provide me, despite the issue being that it is unusable. What sort of company doesnt actually listen to its customers in this manner? I am more than capable of running a new cable myself, but if I did so they could accuse me of criminal damage as I am not "qualified" to do such a thing. Clowns.
Welcome to consumer tech support. Tier 1 has a Script, and the Script is all they know. There is no deviation from the Script. The Script is their shepherd and they shall not think. Their primary job is to insulate the actual technical people from hordes of customers who don't know where their fucking power button is. Unfortunately, they also insulate them from customers who actually know what the hell they're doing. Your mission is to penetrate that protective shell and reach someone with a working frontal lobe. Once you do, they'll likely be able to fix it in minutes.
The problem I always have when I have to deal with Time-Warner is that while I've perfected blowing past Tier 1 (mostly by being belligerent, overwhelming them with detail and making a note of the fact that
I do this for a living) and stumping Tier 2, the higher tiers are never readily available to take my call and *never* call me back. I usually wind up figuring it out myself.
The other way I get past Tier 1 is that most of it is offshored, and after asking someone to repeat themselves 8 times because I literally can't understand most of what they're saying, they'll eventually transfer you to Tier 2 just for that.