What does it take to get this nightmare solved? A new provider?

We had a storm here in Florida on Thursday the 16th that ended up frying half of the electronics in the house as well as completely knocking out both our cable and internet services.

When I initially called the night of the 16th I was told that there was an outage and that it hopefully would be fixed in a few hours. Ok, I can deal with that. I was also told that in the event we needed more assistance that I could schedule an appointment to have a tech come out. The earliest one could come out would be Sunday. If taking care of the outage got our services back on, the ticket would be cancelled. Not a fan of waiting several days to have someone come out to fix something but I didn't have much of a choice.

The outage is resolved but our services are still out. Glad I made an appointment for the tech to come out.

Sunday rolls around and the tech does come out. At least he was on time (only good part of this story). He introduced himself and said he was going to take a look. He looked for all of about 5 minutes and said that a complete reinstall was necessary, complete with burying a new line. I was told that Cox would take care of everything and that the problems we had been having (slow internet speeds, pixelated picture) would be fixed. Before they could fix everything though, they had to have the lines marked for digging. Once the lines were marked they would get right on it. When I asked for an estimate on when to expect the lines to be marked the tech told me "the County will probably sit on the request for a day but someone at Cox will stay on top of them to make sure this is taken care of quickly". He estimated work would be started and hopefully finished on Tuesday the 21st.

Tuesday the 21st comes and no work is done nor am I given a call. I do my own research and find out that it'll take 2-3 days to have the lines marked. Why am I told a day by the tech?

Wednesday the 22nd comes and I hear nothing. No work is done. By anyone.

I call customer service on Thursday the 23rd and ask for an update as to what is going on. She tells me there is an open ticket  but no scheduled completion date is set. She says my ticket will be escalated and if any new information comes that I'll be notified immediately. After discussion she also suggests that since a complete install is needed that it would be best to make sure that all the outlets are uncovered so work can be done. 

Here we are on Friday the 24th and I call customer service...again. I ask for an update...again. After a good 10-15 minutes on hold the rep comes back and says the date to bury the cable and do the install is between JULY 5-7 but she'll see if the install can be done before burying the cable. I asked the tech that on Sunday and was told that couldn't be done because the cable would have to cross the street. Before I can tell her that, I'm back on hold. After another 5-10 minutes on hold, I hang up, angry and demoralized (I have a limit to my patience, it has been exceeded by far and I don't want to take out my anger on the rep). At that point I'm also wondering what deals a dish company can do. 

I have someone at the house recovering from treatments for lung cancer that just gets to sit there and stare at the wall especially considering that being without WiFi for over a week has caused both of us to blast through our data plans on our phones. No music, no Netflix, no cable, no internet. Nothing to do as she tries to relax and recover from weeks and weeks of chemo and radiation. Sure, we could read books but if I wanted to read books I wouldn't need Cox's services to begin with. To top it all off I now have furniture pulled out all throughout the house so a tech can work. A tech that apparently isn't scheduled to come out until July 5.

So if I go with their timeline, we will have been without all services for almost 3 weeks. To me that is totally unacceptable. Any effort I make to get answers is met with long hold times and completely different answers if I'm lucky to get an answer at all.

I'm willing to bet if  a Cox employee (or their friends and family) had an outage like this that they wouldn't have to wait 3 weeks to get it taken care of. Further proof that a monopoly on the cable services in the area does not go well for consumers. It feels like I'm dealing with Comcast!

I'm glad that they'll be taking care of the costs of all the installation but does that mean that all sense of urgency is gone or that all priority for customer service is given up? I'm still having to pay monthly subscriptions for other services that I can't currently use because I can't use the services that I pay Cox thousands a year for. Additionally I can't setup most of the electronics that I had to replace because I need an internet connection to get the ball rolling.

What does someone have to do in order to actually get something taken care of? I'm tired of spending more time on hold waiting for someone to ask someone else something. I'm tired of them acting like shrugging their shoulders is an acceptable answer and being told I'm a valued customer. If I'm a valued customer, show me, don't tell me.