Off-Topic: The Opposite of Good is Not Evil; it's Apathy

Last month, Mediacom reached an important milestone by adding a slew of HD channels including the high-definition feed of InDemand, the carrier for UFC pay-per-view events. It only took two years of desperate phone calls and email groveling to Mediacom, InDemand and even Zuffa for me to pull this off (yes, me...I alone am responsible.)

Mediacom sales reps and their loved ones can rest easy now that UFC in HD - something they promised me when upgrading my digital box two years ago - actually exists.

Sadly, a separate experience with Mediacom customer service recently showed me that while they're gradually (and grudgingly) making some investments in their hardware infrastructure, it's business as usual in the service department.

In my "spare time" I manage rental properties. While I cannot endorse rental property management as a hobby, pastime or livelihood, I will concede that you benefit immeasurably from the ass-kicking the Universe sees fit to give you. Any notions of easy money, passive income and the leisurely life of a land baron quickly evaporate while you struggle in 95-degree heat to remove a monolithic air conditioner from a college apartment window as the 20 year-old female tenants look on and offer kindly to help. "Nah, it's cool," you grunt, as your lumbar vertebra audibly adjust and pigeon droppings and condensation spill all over you.

Such experiences teach one humility.

That said, nothing prepared me for the unparalleled apathy I encountered when I phoned Mediacom to reconnect cables following a flat roof replacement.

For years, Mediacom's contract installers had had free reign on our roof and common building areas, routing cables as necessary without any thought to aesthetics, practicality or the integrity of the roof. All cables entered the roof crudely via holes bored with spade bits, slathered with silicone goo. The roof itself featured a breathtaking tangled web of coaxial cables. When our roofing company recently removed the old taking, they couldn't find any connectors to remove, and thus in the interest of time took the initiative to cut the cables altogether.

Fair enough. Roofers have enough variables to deal with. To their credit, they had the foresight to install a nice rugged PVC fitting to properly conduct such cables in the future.

Now that they're finished, I attempted to phone Mediacom in order to have a technician visit the site to restore service and reconnect cables while routing them properly.

I may just as well have asked them if I could have cable Internet delivered to a boat.

After wading through 5 minutes of muzak and IVR hurdles and being summarily transferred three times (repeating myself each time,) I found myself talking to speaking with a fantastically unimaginative and unmotivated customer service representative.

While this friendly CSR seemed to comprehend my issue well enough, the notion of a property manager calling on behalf of all the building's tenant subscribers just plain blew his mind. Rather than acknowledging the actual problem, he busied himself trying to classifying the issue. "Is this commercial or is it residential?" he asked, confounded by the lack of granular and extraneous details. "Is this for a business?" Unwilling to deviate from the standard CSR support call algorithm, he repeated himself.

Recognizing the dreaded infinite recursion loop, I cut my losses. I politely told him I would simply call the tenants individually and ask them to phone the cable company individually. (The technicians visiting the site would be forced to contact me to gain access to the roof.)