You might think driving to a Time Warner office, filling out transfer forms, and copying your IDs—twice—might convince Time Warner to change the name on your bill; but you would be wrong.

Rather than waste another 45 minutes languishing in line, Matt used our contact information to launch everybody’s favorite armament, the Executive Email Carpet Bomb:

Dear Mr. Jeff Simmermon and Ms. Terry Cronin,

The good people at the Consumerist recommended I email you with my problem, which has dissolved into a Kafka-esque farce.

The thumbnail sketch of my situation is this… In mid-June, my roommate Alexis moved to Seattle and out of the apartment we shared. I stayed in said apartment and wanted to continue TW’s service. Before she moved out, we’d gone into a TW Cable office, filled out the transfer forms, had them copy our IDs and thought everything would just be transferred–after all, we were only changing the name on the account, not any of the services–and they assured us it would be.

Toward the end of June or thereabouts, I received a letter saying that somehow they had not received a copy of my driver’s license, though I’d seen the woman who took our applications make one. Odd, I thought, but I dutifully made a copy of my license, filled out the form, and sent it in. I call to confirm that this is all I need to do. I’m assured it is.

In late July, I realized that the account was still in my roommate’s name when she got a new bill, so I went in to my local office (in Santa Monica) for the second time. I was told to go to the Culver City office as that’s ‘where the paperwork is…’. Uh, okay….so I drive over, wait in line for about 45 minutes, fill out all the paperwork again, they make TWO copies of my license. I confirm–enough times that they started to get annoyed–that this was all that needed to be done and the names would be changed automatically within two weeks.

Guess what I found out today? That’s right, the change has not been made.

I call TW Cable from work. I’m told to go into an office. I explain I’ve done that already. I ask for a supervisor. I wait for 40 minutes due to high call volume until my office closes and I have to go home and try again. Then I decide to give emailing you two a try.

Please, all I want to do is change the name on the bills. No service changes to my phone, cable or internet. No address change, either. Literally everything should be the same except the name on the bill.

Please, is there anything you can do? I’ve been happy with my service overall–which I’ve had since TW took over our account from Comcast–but this experience has wasted so much of my time (two Saturdays, several hours on weeknights, plus an hour at work today) that I’m exploring other options.

Thank you and regards,
Matt

Terry Cronin later responded:

I do apologize for all the confusion! I certainly will have this looked into right away. You should receive a call sometime today.

Read our handy guide and you too can learn how to fire the problem-solving Executive Email Carpet Bomb.

(Photo: Getty)

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