RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

lastpass was recently recommended to my by Ed Bott as a multiplatform password manager. I like lastpass a lot. It does exactly what I wanted and needed and it is free. They have a product LastPass Premium which adds functionality—BlackBerry app and YubiKey multi-factor authentication—that appeals to me. The price is $12 per year for the service and an additional fee for the YubiKey of between $30-$40, depending upon delivery method. I was all set to buy both when I was confronted with a PayPal page.

In the past when I went to a merchant’s PayPal page there was an option to pay with my credit card and not have to login to PayPal. Not this time. This time I had to login to PayPal to make the transaction. They left me no choice since I had a PayPal account. I tried to use a different email address but that didn’t work because PayPal knew my credit card number. Although I could have used a different card I was not interested.

So I logged in. Now PayPal wanted to debit my checking account and offered no option that I could see to use my credit card.

I refuse to allow PayPal to debit my checking account. They are unregulated and, in my opinion, untrustworthy. I don’t let any business debit my account. I prefer to initiate the transaction to retain control over the account. I prefer to use my credit cards. But this time I could not.

Enough of this aggravation! I cancelled my PayPal account. I wrote lastpass.com an email explaining that PayPal debiting my checking account was unacceptable to me and that I was unlikely to buy their premium product or to recommend it since PayPal had become an impediment.

Robert B. of lastpass responded quite quickly suggesting that I could do what I wanted to do with a link to buy by credit card on the PayPal page. Sorry, Robert, that link was not available to me as long as I had a PayPal account.

Yes, I cancelled my PayPal account after this aggravation. Now I am too frustrated to go forward with the LastPass Premium transaction. This is too hard. I wanted something secure and simple. I wanted it on my terms. I did not get that.

If the rest of the world treated me this way I would feel like royalty.

My post of March 21, 2009, Another angry Cablevision customer, recounts my frustrating and anger inducing experience talking with the billing department about what happened after the technical department fixed a problem with my service.

Yesterday I was called by Cablevision’s Andrea W., a polite, kind lady, who wanted to fix this issue. She listened to my side of the event and was the first person to understand that:

1. I did understand what Cablevision’s “revised” bills were about.
2. From my point of view, Cablevision had surprised me with a very large unannounced set of new bills, forever accelerated what I owed them by two weeks, and that the lack of sympathy and concern on the part of the “robotic” agents in the billing department was off-putting, frustrating and anger inducing. After all, Cablevision had caused the problem and fixed it by screwing up my account.

Additionally, another employee, Jim M., has been following me on Twitter and sending me private posts to see if this situation can be resolved. It is fantastic that a multi-billion dollar company would reach out to resolve my complaint this way.

I am usually an advocate of Cablevision’s services. They usually offer bleeding edge services, top-notch technical support, and reasonable pricing, especially compared to the alternatives. My experience with the billing department made me rethink my unpaid evangelism.

On Tuesday night, at my CTPC presentation on Social Networking for the 21st Century: Facebook and Twitter, one of the members who had moved out of the Cablevision territory related his unhappy experiences with Comcast and AT&T’s Uverse.

My typical reply to people who complain to me about Cablevision is that they could experience really bad service if they had AT&T, Charter, Comcast, or Time Warner instead. Andrea W. knows. She works for Cablevision but lives in a Time Warner location.

I am gratified and impressed that Cablevision respected and responded to my concerns. Sometimes large corporations get it right. This is one of those times.

Cablevision is my cable company. They provide me with three services—cable TV, Internet service and telephony, respectively Optimum IO TV, Optimum Online, and Optimum Voice. I was a happy customer, even a fan of Cablevision. They have top-notch, often bleeding edge technology and good technical support. What’s not for a geek like me to like—their billing department!

All the good will they built up over more than twenty years was extinguished by my encounter with their billing department today.

About a month ago I wanted to set up a web server using the hosting service that is included with my premium high-speed broadband Internet service they call Boost. I tried to access the web hosting to no avail. I spoke with three different technical support people over a two week period who all tried their best to help. Finally, Erik hit upon the idea of fixing the problem by rebuilding the account in their database, which he did and it worked, I think. You see, I started my server project when I had a window of available time. Since it took almost two weeks to fix the problem the window closed and I have not had the opportunity to set up the service.

Today I received two bills from Cablevision. I had paid the most recent bill on March 18, 2009 so this was a surprise. Adding further to my surprise was learning that Erik had precipitated a change in my account number and that Cablevision was now billing me for a stub period on the old account and about 40 days on the new account. They had also changed my billing cycle, moving it up from the end of the month to the middle. In effect, Cablevision was asking me to loan them about $100 for a month or more because of the way they fixed the web hosting problem.

I tried to explain this to five customer service representatives in the billing department. Their consistent response was that the billing was correct and they could do nothing to adjust it. They were indifferent to the fact that Cablevision had neither notified me that this would occur, nor gotten my approval. They did not dispute the events. They just were not going to fix this.

I have been a customer of theirs since 1987. I have always paid my bills on time, usually early. This means nothing. Their billing department acts like a bully and there is little I can do but add my voice to all other angry Cablevision customers.