Time Warner Cable To Learn They're Being Sued Just As Soon As Their Service Is Restored
Longtime readers of Defamer no doubt recall the days when our corporate campus was limited to a fifty-acre plot on the Eastside. True, we had all the razor scooters and air hockey we ever dreamed of, but, unfortunately, we were also solely reliant on the unstable intertube-accessing services of Time Warner Cable. This led to frequent outages, requiring the entire editorial department to wander, laptops in hand, from Silver Lake coffee house to coffee house in a desperate search for a working connection—where we'd inevitably be greeted with hastily posted signs of this nature. Why rehash the wounds of the past, you ask? Well, read on:
Time Warner Cable Inc. was accused Thursday of lying to Los Angeles subscribers and providing shoddy customer service in a lawsuit that seeks potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines against the city's main provider of cable television.
"The company has broken multiple laws, and harmed countless Los Angeles consumers," City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo said in a statement. The suit was filed as a civil law enforcement action and names the people of California as plaintiffs.
The suit also seeks $2,500 in penalties for each violation — and that would be doubled to $5,000 for each violation involving a senior citizen or disabled person, city attorney's spokesman Nick Velasquez said.
The total fine being sought would "conservatively" be in the tens of millions of dollars, he said.
We applaud these bold steps taken on behalf of consumers against corrupt cable monopolies, as we've for too long been the victims of a form of History Channel-robbing, porn-download-depriving rape. If anyone can right this wrong, it's our city's PR-friendly crusading D.A., Rocky Delgadillo. Now if you'll excuse us, we've been on hold with a Time Warner operator for the past 45 minutes, and we're wondering if that cable guy is going to ever show up in the guaranteed six-hour window. If you can read this post, it means the problem may have already been fixed.
