There are few things that irk me more than someone who doesn't respect the value of my time. Latest to find themselves in my doghouse; Cox Cable.
Tuesday night around 11 Cox pulled the plug on Internet access to all 47,000 of its residential customers in Santa Barbara.
Cox claimed the outage was planned. Too bad they didn't tell anyone about it in advance. After all, they have several entry points into my life starting with e-mail (they're never shy about spamming me about some new "must have" service for me to buy) an insert in the fat bill for cable and Internet which they send to me once a month, or a crawl across the top of my TV screen that evening telling me the Internet was going to be turned off.
Kind of ironic when you consider that the company prefers to be known as Cox Communications.
Of course the outage came at a most inopportune time for me, when I was finishing my blog post for the next day and trying to get it uploaded. If I knew what was happening I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my time that night and into the next morning trying to troubleshoot my Internet connection in an effort to get it going again.
For those of you who are early risers and want to know why my Wednesday post wasn't up by dawn, you can thank Cox Cable.
Casualty reports from the latest round of layoffs at the Ventura County Star continue to trickle in. Among the carnage, Patricia Marroquin who worked at the Star's copy desk. Marroquin is the wife of George Foulsham, a one-time managing editor at the News-Press who was among those who resigned on July 6, 2006. After the News-Press Foulsham went on to become Assistant Managing Editor, for the L.A. Daily News. He currently works as News Director at UCSB.
Marrouquin's thoughts upon leaving the Star are posted at her blog.
Closer to home, Ray Estrada, managing editor for the Pacific Coast Business Times, was reportedly laid off last Thursday.
When I tried to get a confirmation from the paper's editor Henry Dubroff, he declined to comment.
The L.A. Times' Homicide Report is going on hiatus.
Finally, death takes a holiday.
Well, at least the Times gave notice that the Homicide Report was going to disappear for awhile.
Which is more than I can say for Cox Cable.
