Not everyone needs cable anymore. A lot of people watch everything they want with streaming services.

In today’s story, one man decides to cancel cable, but getting the cable company to understand that he no longer has a cable box isn’t exactly straightforward.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

Cable company kept calling to recharge even after disconnecting service, booked tech support to fix non-existent TV box.

My old TV finally broke down, so I got a new smart tv.

Couple weeks later I realized that no one in the family watches any TV channels, everyone goes for streaming content. I decided that it’s not worth it to pay for the TV connection anymore.

Now, my TV connection is added into my phone plan along with my Internet as well, so disconnecting it was not straight forward. It was a custom plan with its own dedicated relationship team.

It took several calls to the team to find a resolution, which was to convert the TV connection to a prepaid one and then stop recharging.

OP thought everything was taken care of.

After the conversion was done, I got messages for a few weeks to recharge and then finally a message to return the set top box.

I responded to that, and in a few days, the box was collected from my place.

Good riddance.

Or so I thought.

Then the phone calls started.

Next started calls from random call centers for recharging.

It felt different from the dedicated relationship team.

I googled and found out that this had become the practice in my country. The company had outsourced this part of the support to a 3rd party, and they simply checked from the printed database about people who had a connection, but did not recharge last month.

Since my disconnection was in the middle of the month, and their printed database was from the beginning, they did not have this updated info.

Eventually, OP booked an appointment with tech support.

I tried my best to inform them about this to no avail.

I started talking to the callers informing them of the fake problem my TV was having connecting to the set top box and that multiple support requests have fallen on deaf ears. Also started recording the calls.

3rd caller took it seriously and booked tech support.

Got a call from a field tech within hours.

The field tech laughed about the situation.

He came by. I greeted him with drinks and informed him about the real issue.

We had a good laugh.

He suggested that I keep it up a few more times for good measure.

The supervisor called.

After 8 tech support visits, finally they got the message.

Got a call from a supervisor asking why I was booking tech support when clearly I didn’t have a connection anymore.

I mailed him the call recordings.

He was pretty annoyed. But I stopped getting calls so much. Any call I get now (rarely, like once a couple weeks), I just read from the same script, and if someone takes it seriously enough to try to book tech support, they get a short note against my id to not bother this gentleman.

Sometimes call centers just don’t understand. Recording the calls is what really paid off for OP since that’s what made a difference for the supervisor.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

This reader points out the problem.

Another reader wouldn’t have answered the phone.

This reader thinks this tech company is pretty archaic.

Another person doesn’t think this is pro revenge.

I probably wouldn’t have answered the phone.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.