Have a Heart

It has been almost 17 years since I left the cable television industry, during which time the technology involved has changed beyond recognition not just once, but several times. In the early 1990s broadband service was still under development, but we knew it was coming; 18-inch microwave dishes and the satellites to supply them were being tested by Hughes Satellite Systems and cable companies were upgrading their systems to fiber optic equipment that would allow them to carry high-speed Internet connections in addition to a vastly increased number of cable channels. The company I worked for used 18Mhz microwave signals to provide service to large apartment complexes within line-of-sight from our download site, and then distributed the signal to any residents who wanted to pay for it using an encrypted signal and decoder boxes – the much-maligned “cable boxes” to limit unauthorized use. Of course, these methods were always of limited utility; some people managed to steal the signal anyway, and a surprising number of people also tried to steal the cable boxes…

The thing to keep in mind here is that despite what most cable customers (and apparently nearly all thieves) at the time believed, most cable decoder systems weren’t actually decryption computers stuffed full of secret codes that would resolve a collection of distorted snow into a clear picture. What they were was an electronic switchbox that would descramble those signals when instructed to do so by the master computer in our control room – no control instructions, no pictures; not even broadcast channels would be visible. To get these instructions, the box needed to be authorized to do so by a member of the company with the correct security codes – quite frequently me, as it happens. Stealing the box, hooking it up in a location not authorized to have it, or worse still hooking it up to another cable system would be completely useless – but that didn’t keep people from trying it several hundred times each year…

Now, in fairness, a lot of those people weren’t actually trying to steal our decoder boxes; a lot of them just absent-mindedly packed up the boxes when they moved, and didn’t bother to return them until I sent their account to collections for the amount of the cable box (and generally their unpaid bills). It’s just that there would have been no way for me to tell the difference from our offices, and no contractual reason for me to care. But when there were extenuating circumstances I would always do my best to help. Customers who had been robbed, for example, I would usually excuse (assuming they could produce an actual police report about the theft), and I let the man who was bringing his cable box in to the office to return it when his car was hit by a drunk driver and destroyed off the hook, although it helped that he brought in the police report, insurance report, and the remains of the decoder box with him. Thus I was very disappointed in the cable company in this story from the Morning Call site , who appear to have completely dropped the ball following a tragic fire and gas explosion…

In this particular case, RCN Cable was attempting to charge a family that had just lost their home in a gas explosion for their missing cable boxes. The customers were offering to document the loss, and the event had been all over the local news anyway, but the zombies running the call center wouldn’t budge off of regular procedures or let them speak to anyone of higher authority. In this case I don’t have to extrapolate (or guess) what the right thing to do was; I’ve done that exact job, and I know what the right thing to do was: document everything, let the accountants write off the equipment loss on the corporation’s tax returns, and let the customer off the hook with our blessings and best wishes. Instead we’ve all be treated to a teachable moment about how the ability to think – or at least escalate a call to someone who can – is more important than blind adherence to general rules. Unless you want your company slammed on the local television news, yelled at by the mayor of your city, and mocked by millions of scruffy bloggers all over the Internet, have a heart – or at least have someone on call who has one during business hours…