In the past 8 or 10 months, the cable company has implemented a policy of booking more service calls than the technicians can handle in a given day. The idea is that you are booked to wait home in case the technician gets freed up due to a cancelation or customer not home. They have every intention of calling you at 5 o'clock to lie to you about an outage or emergency being the reason why the tech was unable to attend, after you've waited all day for someone to show up.

I learned this from a technician when I asked them if they were ok because they seemed stressed. They told me they hated the fact that they were going to disappoint customers today despite every effort on their part and that the company was going to call customers and lie and blame them. —I guess the 80's are back in management as well as fashion?