Outage

I suggest you, and the rest of us, contact our state and federal representatives. Ask them to enact laws requiring companies to compensate consumers when companies waste their time. The first encounter should be no-fault, but after that if the company does not address a legitimate issue, the consumer will be compensated for their time spent on it at the same hourly rate as the company compensates its CEO (complete with benefits, stock options, etc.). This under the theory that a consumer's time is as valuable to him/her as the CEO's time is valuable to him/her: we're all born and we all will die.

In your case, your situation is a bit different. Most people who've posted here, tried to get Cox to address a problem, and Cox keeps jerking them around. In your case, it sounds as if Cox might have known about the outage, planned for it, but failed to notify you. So Cox wasted your time. If so, then there should be no no-fault excuse; instead, you and other customers should be compensated for any reasonable amount of time you spent due to Cox's negligence. Not notifying you for a planned upgrade would be negligence.

The one legitimate excuse in your case would be if the outage was unforeseeable, Cox responded to it immediately, and Cox had no way to contact you to let you know what was going on.

OTOH, failure to staff phone and chat support adequately would be negligence, and therefore your time trying to get such support would be compensated at the CEO rate.

Such legislation would have three positive effects. (1) It would create an incentive structure for spatial monopolists like Cox to provide decent service. (2) It would discourage the outrageous growth in CEO pay (since 1978: 940% for CEOs vs 12% for workers; the ratio of CEO:worker pay has grown from around 20:1 to as much as 278:1). (3) It would serve justice by compensating persons who did nothing wrong but must subscribe to Cox because of lacking alternatives.