One of the things that we’ve found most remarkable about Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s infamous customer service is that it seems absolutely no one within either company definitively knows anything about the products and services they’re offering. Case in point: Time Warner Cable customer Frank Catena recently received an upgrade offer in the mail from Time Warner Cable that seemingly promised him a free tablet if he upgraded his package to include pay TV. Actually taking advantage of this upgrade, however, proved to be much more difficult than anticipated.
RELATED: Be very careful when you sign up for one of Time Warner Cable’s two-year promotions
As you can see in the picture above, the offer is extremely clear cut: Upgrade to a TV and “Ultimate Internet” package for $84.99 per month and get a “FREE… brand new Dell Inspirion 11 3000 Series 2-in-1.” However, Catena explains to Reddit that when he called TWC to sign up, he was told completely contradictory things by a whopping seven different people at the company, who kept transferring his call around like they were playing hot potato.
Finally, he got transferred to a customer service representative who admitted that the promotion, much like the cake in Portal, was a lie. It turns out that, despite what the letter told him, he didn’t actually qualify for the offer after all, despite the fact that it said in plain English that it was an upgrade plan for current TWC subscribers.
However, there’s a somewhat happy ending to the story: After his story blew up on Reddit, he got in touch with an eighth customer service representative who admitted to him that he should have been able to qualify for the offer based what the letter told him. So now he’ll upgrade to a new Internet and TV package and get his free Dell tablet after all. That said, he’s still not happy about it and told TWC to really have a talk with its marketing department about sending out promotions that the company has no intention of honoring.
