We present a week of cable companies acting badly….  They charge you top dollar and leave their cables hanging all over the place.  Learn how homeowners turn in frustration to the media to correct sometimes dangerous installations that are accidents waiting to happen.  Cable Week on Stop the Cap!

If you are not a Rogers Cable customer, don’t bother calling them about problems with their cables because they don’t care.

That’s the message eastern Canada’s largest cable company had for one Toronto homeowner who thought he was being a Good Samaritan by letting the cable giant know the temporary cable they installed after a recent fire in his neighborhood had become a tangled, dangling mess.

On July 14, arsonists set four east-end garages ablaze, creating an enormous mess for utility companies whose cables were engulfed in flames so hot, they melted an adjacent homeowner’s siding right off his home despite being more than 30 meters away from the inferno.

Utility companies responded to restore service to homes between Prust and Hastings Avenues.  Temporary cables were installed by Hydro One, Bell, and Rogers.  Priority was given to service restoration, and it showed.  The resulting tangle of wire strung through fences and trees, across roofs and even along the pavement in the alley, according to a report in the Toronto Star.

While Hydro One and Bell managed to replace temporary lines with clean and neat permanent cables, Rogers left their temporary cables drooping and dangling all over the neighborhood.

The Star’s ‘Fixer’ picks up the story as a reader found an intransigent cable company unwilling to clean up their mess:

“Basically, I was told I would have to live with this mess because I’m not a (Rogers) subscriber,” said the reader.

He said wire was strung through his fence and in his neighbour’s parking space.

We checked it out and found an appalling sprawl of wires, some much larger than others, which suggests they’re major service lines, haphazardly strung through many backyards.

Rogers may not care about those who don’t buy service from them, but they do care about their image in the media.  When the newspaper called the cable company, a fire of a different kind was lit under them to get the job done.

Sarah Holland, who deals with media, arranged for a crew to go out the same day, which began work on permanent wiring Wednesday and completed the job Friday. The reader emailed again to say a “Rogers foreman just knocked on my door to have me inspect the job and ensure everything was done to my satisfaction. Now that’s service!”