GREENSBORO, N.C. — Damian Vaughan is a fairly reasonable person. Vaughan doesn’t get upset if the grocery store is out of milk for one week, won’t scream and yell if his garbage can is the only one in the neighborhood not emptied on trash day, and won’t even make a fuss if a neighbor’s party went a bit too long and kept him up.
So when his cable provider did the unusual, he didn’t sweat it at first.
"They told me it would be temporary"
“They told me it would be temporary,” Vaughan said. “They said the line from (my) cable box to this box was putting out a weak charge.”
The temporary solution to the issue was to run a new line from the box on his property to the box in his neighbor’s yard. The line, however, could not be buried, so it ran along the gutter in front of his driveway and a neighbor's to a box in another neighbor’s yard.
“It’s a long way,” Vaughan said. “I know the kids were playing with it. We had to tell them it was dangerous.”
It certainly wasn’t ideal to have your cable line exposed and run over, every time you or your neighbor want to pull in or out of the driveway, but it was temporary, so he wasn’t too concerned.
The unusual fix did make mowing the grass a bit of a challenge as Vaughan had to move the line from one side of the grass to the other when he mowed the yard. One week while trimming the grass, he got a bit too close to the line and sliced right through it.
"Everyone had an outage that day"
“It took the whole street out, everyone had an outage that day,” Vaughan said.
As you can imagine, he was not the most famous person on the block that day, but it wasn’t entirely his fault. This temporary issue had yet to be resolved and it had been quite a while.
Vaughan and his neighbor would call and ask when the line would be buried, or another solution found but never seemed to get a straight answer.
“We called a lot, but they seemed to forget about us,” he said.
The issue continued to drag on and Vaughan was starting to get annoyed. Remember, this is a man that has more than a decent amount of patience, so for him to be a bit frustrated took some doing.
The 'temporary line' had been there for two years
Finally, he had enough, and he and his neighbor got in touch with WFMY News 2. At this point, that temporary line had been in front of his driveway for more than two years.
“It’s frustrating because when we drive through other neighborhoods, they do not have this problem,” Vaughan said.
The Greensboro neighborhood is nice, but it’s not littered with million-dollar homes or surrounded by gates.
“They didn’t seem to prioritize us,” he said.
How News 2 helped fix the problem
After calling us, we were able to contact the cable provider and speak with an executive in the corporate office. Within a week, a technician went out to the house and diagnosed the problem. The technician started a ticket and apologized to Vaughan for the delay.
“His manager sent him out here, he immediately apologized saying it should not have been like this,” he said.
Not long after that, another technician came out to resolve the issue and remove the cable from the street. It took far too long but after calling WFMY News 2, Vaughan was finally able to enjoy the service he paid for without having to have the cable draped in from of his home and his neighbors' yards.
“Thanks, News 2, we watch you all the time,” he said.
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