No charge for flooded cable boxes
By Katherine Leal Unmuth
San Antonio Express-News
Web Posted : 08/01/2002 12:00 AM
The president of Time Warner Cable San Antonio said Wednesday that "miscommunication" caused some employees to wrongly tell customers they would be charged for converters damaged or destroyed by flooding.
On Monday, Time Warner spokeswoman Karen Hartley said the company would charge customers $300 for cable boxes destroyed by flooding.
But on Wednesday, President Kevin G. Kidd said the company had decided not to charge customers for the converters.
"There clearly has been a lot of miscommunication on this issue in the last few days," said Kidd, who replaced Navarra Williams as president last week.
He said an executive response team was set up to handle problems involving flood victims, and those team members were instructed not to charge for any damages resulting from the floodwaters.
Kidd confirmed that the company's usual policy is to charge customers for damaged equipment, and that policy was communicated to several customers who phoned in questions about destroyed converters.
"Clearly some (customers) didn't get through to the executive response team and were handled by the normal day-to-day policy," Kidd said.
Charlie Caldwell said he was relived to hear that Time Warner had "a change of heart" and would not be charging him for his two damaged cable boxes, as he had initially been told. Caldwell and his wife, Melanie, lost their Canyon Lake home in the flooding and are living in a trailer.
"It made me feel good. But to be honest, with everything we lost they would have had a hard problem collecting the money anyway," Caldwell said. "I understand if it's stolen, but when you bring it back to them and it's covered in mud there's hardly any doubt what happened."
Caldwell's stepdaughter, Dannielle Guerra, said a representative from the company called the family Wednesday to apologize for the misunderstanding.
"I didn't want any special treatment from them; I just didn't want them to charge my family or anyone else," she said. "I'm really excited that they dropped the charges."
kunmuth@express-news.net
http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=180&xlc=773949&xld=180
And you don't have to. So this is over.