That reminds me of an interesting event circa 1993. I had just moved and was going to order cable. I had heard that a lot of cable installers did what the called “Coffee shop disconnects.” They had figured that when they got a disconnect order for an apartment that it would not be long before they got a connect order for the new tenant. They would sit in a restaurant and do the respective paperwork when the orders came in but never touch the physical cables. I hooked up my TV and it worked. Never ordered it and enjoyed free basic cable for 5-6 years. This was from South Bay Cablevision before the big roll up of cable providers.
And even more interesting was that 7% of our disconnects had a reconnect order on the same day. Our techs would get the two orders, and just not do either of them. It was infuriating. We stopped that pretty quickly.
We started our own version of DOGE back in the day to pick up on stuff like that. I saved the company, throughout our region, $3 million in the first year.
When you are in a fast growing industry those types of things slide by because you are moving so fast trying to keep up.
My understanding is the CATV industry is not moving “that fast” any more.