KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Ninety-three days is how long a Northland man has put up with a thick orange cable running across the length of his front yard.
It took him weeks to figure out which utility it even belonged to, and a call to FOX4 Problem Solvers to get it removed.
“I’m at wits end,” said Steve Bean, pointing to the brightly colored cable in front of his and his neighbor’s home.
Bean said he first noticed the cable when he backed out of his garage and hit a rubber speed bump on his driveway that had been placed over the cable.
“Where did that come from?” he remembered thinking before noticing the cable extended across his lawn.
Bean wasn’t too worried. He assumed whatever utility had left the cable would soon be back to bury it.
That was in February.
“We waited about a month and nothing happened,” Bean said. “Then we started making phone calls.”
He finally tracked the ownership to Spectrum, which provides phone and internet service to more than a dozen homes in his neighborhood, but not to Bean or his neighbor.
Because Bean doesn’t have a Spectrum account, he said it proved difficult to reach someone on the automated system.
“I’ve made a total of 13 phone calls to Spectrum. Many of them were well over an hour,” said Bean, adding that most of the calls ended with the promise that the cable would soon be taken care of.
But it never was.
Now three months later, his frustration has grown. He’s even considered suing Spectrum.
“But that would cost me money, and that’s kind of ridiculous,” Bean said.
He could disconnect the cable to get it off his property, but he doesn’t want to do that to his neighbors.
“I’m not the guy who is going to disconnect their internet in the middle of a pandemic,” he said.
That’s why he contacted FOX4 Problem Solvers. We immediately emailed Spectrum’s public relations person and explained the problem.
Twenty minutes later, a Spectrum supervisor pulled up to Bean’s home. He seemed shocked by Bean’s predicament and promised to resolve it quickly.
Spectrum said via email that the delay in burying the cable was caused by a “processing error with the initial work order. We have apologized to the customer (and) expedited the matter.”
The next day a crew showed up in the rain to bury the cable that had been part of Bean’s yard since February. Problem solved.