Category Archives: Twitter

customer service, Gadgets, posterous, Twitter

HEXBUG Original (not Ant) Breaks a Leg

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And so it goes. We have a busted leg, and the poor thing can barely walk. Our oldest son is bummed; he worked really hard at school to earn it as a reward. As you can hopefully see, the location of the break and the size of the leg both would seem to make repair pretty unlikely…

UPDATED (June 2013): Posterous.com folded, and with it, the images from this post. Only noticed it now; oops. We’ll see about finding originals from a backup and repairing things at some point. Maybe… this post IS pretty old.

[images were here… gone now until we fix it, if we fix it]

Got a response on Twitter about this earlier today, so we emailed the company. We’ve not had it very long, so maybe they will help us with a replacement or something…

UPDATE: The fine folks at HexbugCo are sending a replacement. Now that’s customer service. Quick, no-hassle assistance that I’ll remember the next time I see their product in stores–and buy more of it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I screwed up when I looked up which bug this was. Replacement Ant came today, and I noticed it’s a different bug! Looking at the HEXBUG site again, our busted bug is an Original, not an Ant. Still, son will be happy and I’m glad Innovation First Labs has been so gracious and helpful.

broadband, Comcast, General, incompetence, Roadrunner, shame on you, Time-Warner, Twitter

The Time-Warner / Roadrunner Sucking Problem still remains

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It’s been almost a month since I last posted about this. Too ticked off, generally.

No change. No response. Nothing.

It’s being suggested over at TechCrunch that Twitter is some sort of magic bullet for solving issues not terribly dissimilar from my own here with Time-Warner Milwaukee. I’m not sure I buy it. I’ve been posting on Twitter a little about it, and I’ve been keeping a separate log of sorts on Twitter as well, and it’s had zero effect on our getting any sort of resolution from TWC-Milwaukee or Roadrunner.

Maybe Twitter is one way to stay on top of customers. Comcast is apparently better at this than TWC/RR, although I don’t know if it’s an officially sanctioned, company-created/endorsed program or a Comcast employee that just happened across an A-lister with a substantial online voice and decided to lend a hand for whatever reason.

In any case, be it Time-Warner or Twitter, neither has done much at all for me in my own situation.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t expect Time-Warner or Roadrunner to track issues on Twitter or anywhere else if they can’t even respond to direct contact from customers…

Welcome to any TechCrunch readers, btw. I’m told a friend of mine has commented on the Comcast thread there… Feel free to help me yell; I don’t have quite the publicity-generating range of the top bloggers and A-listers who get CEOs bending over backwards for them every time they so much as sneeze.

broadband, General, incompetence, Roadrunner, shame on you, Time-Warner, Twitter

Tracking Time-Warner/Roadrunner Cable-Modem-Constantly-Rebooting-Again Problem

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We had this problem last year with Time-Warner/Roadrunner-Milwaukee and it appears we’re having it again now. Constant, random cable modem reboots off and on all day. Yesterday, 45 times. In one day.

Can’t ssh/telnet, can’t do any audio or video streaming. Can’t do downloads, OS updates, Tivo updates, online gaming, no remote-desktop sessions… No file transfers or data backups. And our Vonage phone service? Dropped calls.

We’re being a lot more open about the issue this time than last year when this very same thing happened, because Time-Warner/Roadrunner never actually fixed anything…

In fact, they never contacted us at all.

We had a lot of days of 100+ random cable modem disconnects last year. The random-rebooting problem kind of “went away” when they upgraded their package speeds. We put up with it last year for most of the year, initially with constant disconnects, and then with severely reduced speeds.

We never got a solution or any real help with the problem last year, and it went on for most of the year, with us paying full price the entire time (with a couple of minor loss-of-service credits along the way that ultimately didn’t matter).

You’ll notice 10 most recent Twitter entries in the right sidebar for the TW/RR tracker account. And you’re certainly more than welcome to directly follow either the TW/RR tracker, or Alex, or both, on Twitter itself:

We’ll probably be opening up posts from last year’s incident that have been locked down… We’ll post again if/when that happens. Mostly a direct letter to TW/RR and some logs from the modem back then, with accompanying commentary. Boring, maybe, but also possibly insightful.

We want to be clear that all we’re after is the properly working service we’re paying Time-Warner/Roadrunner for. Hopefully they can figure out a way to make that happen, soon.