After an early/mid nineties storm knocked a cable line down in my back yard. It prevented us from mowing the lawn or burning the landscape debris we had dug a special pit for so, when it became clear that they weren't going to come out on their own, we called the cable company and told them to get it up off the ground and out of our back yard.
They told us that they would have someone out there to do it in three days, which we assumed was due to other lines that were damaged from the same storm (not just on the ground). We called four days later to ask why it was still there and they said that they would send someone in a week. We waited 8 more days and called again and they STILL gave us the run-around, so we just cut it in half and finished the yardwork that it had been preventing us from doing. Sure enough, at least one customer lost service and they came right out to "fix" it.
The idiots simply crimped on some new coax connectors, screwed them into a coupler, and left it on the ground! What kind of moron did they send?! By that time it had been months of us dealing with them when we weren't even their customer, so we just unscrewed it and screwed in a three-way splitter to get free cable for about a year. The bastards wouldn't quit using our land for free, so it was tit-for-tat as far as I am concerned. It was still a pain because the line would get caught up in the grass making mowing the lawn a three-person job and we could no longer just ride our bikes into the woods (full of bike trails) without getting clothes-lined or caught-up in the tires/pedals (depending on what part of the yard you were crossing). You had to either pick up the bike or pick up the cable line.
Eventually, another storm wiped out cable service and we knew that they should (but more realistically, "might") be back in the area, so we disconnected it. Sure enough, they finally raised the line, but it was now going right through one of our trees (touching the trunk).
We were early teenagers then but my twin brother now works for the other local cable company (Newnan Utilities) and they would NEVER allow any of that. I can't recall if the offender was Charter or Cablevision (Charter bought them in the '90s) back then but it was one of those (NU didn't service that particular neighborhood).
