Morgan would have appreciated it if Time Warner Cable had told him that moving to a different address would give him a different account number. He really would have appreciated it if they had told him his before he moved. And he really, really would have appreciated learning this information before sending six months’ worth of payments into a black hole via auto bill pay. Now his service has been disconnected, and he has to pay a $100 disconnection fee along with paying all of his bills since June over again. Then he might get all of that money he sent to the wrong place back.

I have had an account with Time Warner for over 2 years now. When I moved to a new apartment last January I called them to transfer for my service. No problem, I brought the cable box and the modem from [my] old place and they sent a technician to install it in the new place,
everything worked fine. I kept paying my bills online through my bank on time, life was good.

Then in mid-June I got a notice they were going to disconnect my service unless I paid them $253.73 in back payments. That’s funny, I had paid my bill every month in full. I call
and I find out that my payments had been applied to the account associated with my old apartment.

It would have been nice to know I got a new account number from Time Warner when I moved, but no one thought that was something I might like to know. Not the customer service representative I spoke to on the phone to set up and schedule the move, not the technician who installed the service in the new place and no one I talked to when I decided to add HBO to my service
in April.

Well, you think there would be a simple solution, take the payments that went to my old account and apply them to my current account. Boy was I wrong. Well I didn’t find out that wasn’t a possibility until after speaking to a third customer service representative. The first two told me they would transfer the payments and I didn’t have to worry about my service being shut off)

Well, it was shut off on Sunday and that’s when I learned from the third customer service rep they can’t transfer the money. Now they want $101.00 to turn the service back on, and they claim they sent me a check back in early June reimbursing me for the $253.73 I already paid them. I still have yet to get a check and now have had to call three days in a week to get my service re-connected. Why should I have to pay them twice for the same service? In addition I have to wait until the end of the month to make sure they don’t charge me the re-connection fee every time and reimburse me for the late fees which racked up because the payments were applied to my old account.

Sometimes, an executive e-mail carpet bomb jolts Time Warner Cable into action, and that might be worth a try here in order to determine the whereabouts of that check that never reached Morgan. In the end, though, we offer this story as a cautionary tale: don’t leave all of your payments on auto-pilot after a move. Make assumptions at your own peril.

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