Charter Communications Sucks

Never give your cable company your credit card number. Especially if your cable company is Charter.

Last year I decided to have Charter bill my credit card because I was busy and thought it would be easier than dealing with paper bills. I also think there was some sort of incentive offer involved, but I don't remember exactly. Anyhoo, when I moved out of the bunker at the end of May I returned my set-top box and requested my service be cancelled. But it wasn't. In fact, they've now billed more than four months worth of cable and internet service at $116.65 a month to my credit card. They won't stop. They just won't.

I called them again today and asked them nicely to give me back my money. I got the same old run-around: "well for some reason the service isn't physically disconnected yet, but once the service call gets made...blah blah...end of the billing cycle...blah blah...will issue a refund." In other words, the same story I got last month, when the only thing that happened at the end of the billing cycle was I got charged for another month. But this time I started screaming obscenities and demanding my money RIGHT NOW. Apparently this worked, or at least achieved a different type of run-around: supposedly the refund will be posted in the next 24 hours. We'll see.

In hurricane news, Rita wound up weakening to a category 3 (so much for my hurricane forecasting skills) and making landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border. There's concern about more flooding in N.O. obviously. The oil refineries don't seem to have been damaged, at least not as badly as feared. Rita was still a big, bad storm but wasn't as well-aimed as Katrina.