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New Day

CNN Heroes of 2014; Cable Bill Dispute Leads to Being Fired; Bill Gates Talks Ebola

Aired October 10, 2014 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, well, it's an epic customer service battle. An angry customer tries to get a refund from Comcast, but in response he says Comcast got him fired. He joins us live.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, here we go with the five things you need to know for your new day.

We start with number one. Breaking news. Two children's activists score this year's Nobel Peace Prize. They will share it. Malala Yousafzai sharing the award with India's Kailash Satyarthi, who was working -- has worked, rather, to stop child slave labor in India.

Five major U.S. airports getting ready for enhanced Ebola screenings. Two hundred workers, however, who service planes at New York's JFK and LaGuardia Airports, they're on strike, saying they're fearing they'll be exposed.

Kim Jong-un still missing in action. The North Korean leader failed to show up at a palace ceremony overnight, triggering further speculation that he was - that he is ill or has potentially been overthrown.

Turkey's foreign minister insists he is against ISIS and its actions in Kobani, yet he's still refusing to send in his troops to help save that city. Instead, the country is asking for a buffer zone along its frontier with Syria.

President Obama suggesting the Republican Party is committing political suicide by not dealing with immigration reform now. He told a meeting of young entrepreneurs that Republican inaction may make the next generation reject the party.

We do update those five things to know, so be sure to visit newdaycnn.com for the latest.

Chris.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: And so each week we shine a light on the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2014. Here's the key, you decide who wins. You get to go vote for the one who inspires you the most at cnnheroes.com. Where? Cnnheroes.com. So here's this week's honoree. She grew up in a funeral home surrounded by death and grief, but now she helps her Baltimore community focus on life by getting past trauma. Meet Annette March- Grier. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chicken nuggets, french fries, two honey mustards and a milk shake. My daddy ordered the same thing as me. That is my daddy.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My son's father, he was murdered. Their bond, it was just a bond that a lot of kids don't have with their father.

ANNETTE MARCH-GRIER, CNN HERO NOMINEE: A child's grief can be very different from adult's. They can easily lose their identity and their security, and that shift can be very dangerous.

There you go.

How are you feeling today?

Our program provides that safe place for a child to recover after the death of someone close.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hello. How you doing?

MARCH-GRIER: Our volunteers help the children explore their feelings.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why did you choose red?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was angry when my dad passed away.

MARCH-GRIER: And talk about healthy ways of coping.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Get that anger out.

MARCH-GRIER: We teach our children that it's OK to cry.

His brother died, so he's feeling really sad.

Grief is truly a public health problem. We have got to begin to address it.

Coping is how we deal with our feelings.

We're helping to heal wounds and bring families back together again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: Oh, boy, I'll tell you, helping kids, they need it so much. What a great, great ambition she has. Not to jaundice you, but they are all great. I don't want to prejudice your decision.

CAMEROTA: Right.

CUOMO: Who will become the hero - the CNN Hero of the year? You get to decide. Again, go to cnnheroes.com online or your mobile device if you want. You can vote, listen to this, once a day every day, OK?

CAMEROTA: That's great. CUOMO: So you don't do it just once.

CAMEROTA: Early and often, that's our motto.

PEREIRA: Well, at least once a day.

CAMEROTA: OK.

CUOMO: Don't do that in regular elections, just this election.

PEREIRA: Oh, no, really? Is that a new thing?

CUOMO: Yes, that's a problem. I don't know how you do it in Canada, but here we don't.

PEREIRA: Hey now.

CAMEROTA: That's great.

All right, we have heard some pretty awful customer service battles, but you've never heard one quite like this.

PEREIRA: It's a dozy.

CAMEROTA: The customer complained to Comcast about his bill and in turn he alleges the cable giant got him fired from his job. He's going to explain, live.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PEREIRA: This very well could rank up there with the nastiest customer service battle ever. A Californian accountant says complaining about his cable service - complaining about his cable service cost him his job. Conal O'Rourke was fired early this year from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Conal O'Rourke and his attorney Maureen Pettibone Ryan join us this morning from Mountain View, California, where it is awfully early.

Thanks for getting up to tell us this tale. Good morning to the both of you.

I'm going to take you back to 2013 and sort of give the hits, runs and errors. Let me see if I have this right. Conal, you had a series of issues with your service, Internet speed, billing issues, et cetera, that you tried to get resolved. At first they were sort of half- heartedly seemingly addressed. Your work takes you out of the country for a couple of months. You return to see things that you had hoped to be resolved were not resolved. And, in fact, had gotten worse, including you found a delivery of expensive equipment at your door, things you didn't order. You decide to go down to a Comcast store to rectify it and let's just say it didn't go well. You then took it to corporate and that's where things went sideways. Have I got it right?

CONAL O'ROURKE, SAYS COMCAST GOT HIM FIRED OVER BILLING DISPUTE: You have it absolutely right.

PEREIRA: So you go to corporate and then what happens?

O'ROURKE: I reached out to corporate, had a pleasant initial conversation. They said they'd put somebody in touch with me. They did. An individual, Evelyn (ph), had called me, asking me what it was about, how can I help you? And I said I -- do you know why you're calling? She said, yes, about a missed appointment.

From there it went bad. She stated that the appointment was not missed and that we documented the call of your home. From there what happened, she - she went on to say, what's the color of your house? Just tell us - you know, just tell me the color of your house and really berating at that point in time.

PEREIRA: So it started to get aggressive?

O'ROURKE: Yes, it was aggressive. And I, incidentally, I live in a home that's of Spanish architecture, so there's multi colors. So depending upon which way you look at it, right, it could be terra- cotta, it could be sand, it could be beige. You know, so exactly what the -- they have in their system, I have no idea.

PEREIRA: But, again, you're trying to make sense of all of this and it escalates, it escalates, it escalates. And I'm having to truncate it for time, because I could talk to you about this for an hour. But for the benefit of our viewers -

O'ROURKE: Yes.

PEREIRA: It escalates to a point where you find out that you are then released from your job. You are fired from your job at Price Waterhouse Coopers. However --

O'ROURKE: Correct.

PEREIRA: What was said to you? Why were you told you were fired?

O'ROURKE: They said that there was an ethics investigation and that it had revealed what they claimed that I had mentioned that I was with PwC.

PEREIRA: Did you mention that you were with PricewaterhouseCoopers when you were calling to complain? And why is that an issue even?

O'ROURKE: No. The things that I think got me a little bit in -- on the hot seat was that I had stated that I felt their accounting has overstated -- the revenues were overstated.

PEREIRA: You're an accountant, so you would know those sort of things.

MAUREEN PETTIBONE RYAN, CONAL O'ROURKE'S ATTORNEY: Exactly.

O'ROURKE: Right. So I cited some language and then also that I felt that with everybody having billing problems that perhaps it needed to go to the PCAOB.

PEREIRA: So you wanted to take it up higher because you wanted to sort of end these problems for other people, you figured that you were probably just an example of other problems other people were having. Now, Comcast claims they did not ask for you to be fired, but did not deny that they spoke to your employer about you. They did acknowledge that Comcast executives talked to your highers-up at Price Waterhouse Coopers and you think that's where things get murky and ugly.

PETTIBONE RYAN: Yes, and absolutely. I mean, they went to his employer and they told his employer that he had tried to use their name as leverage, that he had violated accounting ethics. That's not a minor charge to make. That's not -- they knew what was going to happen once they made that complaint. So, in their apology to Conal, which we learned about from reporters contacting us, they actually didn't reach out to Conal with this apology. We found it online, just like everyone else. They say oh, well we didn't ask for him to be fired, but it's sort of very imprecise language that leaves open, you know, the fact that they did, and they've admitted, that they started an ethics investigation against him.

PEREIRA: Price Waterhouse Coopers says that you violated the terms of the ethical standards and practices. You are aware, as an accountant, about those ethics and practices, are you not?

O'ROURKE: Correct.

PEREIRA: But do you feel that you overstepped? I mean, you know better than anybody the types of things that you should say. Do you feel --

O'ROURKE: No, I --

PEREIRA: Go ahead.

O'ROURKE: No, I do not believe that. And during the -- they had a very limited investigation, so I was on the phone for actually less than 25 minutes. Then the next thing I know that I had been terminated and there was no -- there was my input was not even relevant.

PEREIRA: I've got to read the response actually from Comcast.

PETTIBONE RYAN: He wasn't even given a chance to respond.

PEREIRA: He wasn't given a chance to respond. Here's the apology Comcast has issued. The said in part, "What happened with Mr. O'Rourke's service is complete unacceptable. Despite our attempts to address Mr. O'Rourke's issues, we simply dropped the ball and did not make things right. Mr. O'Rourke deserves another apology from us, we're making this one publicly." You say it's not really that public. Comcast goes on to say, "We also want to clarify that nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired." Ultimately, we have to wrap things up here, ultimately what do you want out of this? Do you want to file a lawsuit against Comcast, do you want your job back, you want to be reinstated?

O'ROURKE: I would love to be reinstated. I don't think that PWC did the due diligence, and I would love to be reinstated. And I'd also at this point, Price Waterhouse has announced that I've been fired for ethics. So, that's all over the press and that's just wrong.

PEREIRA: Do you wish you could go back and undo some of it, wish you could unsay some of the things you said, or handled it any differently? I'm sure that's kept you up at night a little bit.

O'ROURKE: I don't know how I could have handled it any differently because I tried for months and months and months.

PEREIRA: Yes, this is a long - -

O'ROURKE: To just have somebody just look at my bill, that's all they had to do. Just please, look at it.

PEREIRA: Boy, we can all relate to a frustrating customer service, we've all experienced that. We want to hear what happens with this all. Hopefully you'll let us know the outcome. Conal, thanks so much and we appreciate your lawyer joining us. Conal O'Rourke, Maureen Pettibone Ryan, thanks so much for joining us this morning.

O'ROURKE: Thank you.

PEREIRA: Quite a twisted tale. Hopefully we made some sense of it all there, Alisyn, but I think a lot of us can relate to that frustration when you want something dealt with.

CAMEROTA: Absolutely, it's the most frustrating story that we all deal with all the time. We hope that he gets justice somehow.

Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on that?

CUOMO: No.

CAMEROTA: You're just marinating on that.

CUOMO: I'm trying to figure it out. It's very complicated.

CAMEROTA: Alright, well, billionaire Bill Gates has a different take on the Ebola crisis, and the U.S. response. We'll tell you what he's saying.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Welcome back to NEW DAY. Bill Gates is speaking out about the Ebola crisis in Western Africa. He made the comments to ozy.com and he explained what he thinks of the United States' involvement.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

BILL GATES, CO-CHAIRMAN, BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION: I think it's amazing how the United States has responded to this. Department of Defense whose logistical capability to go into tough places, get planes in and out, get material in and out, I think will be the thing that makes a big difference.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

CAMEROTA: Carlos Watson is the CEO and co-founder of ozy.com. Carlos, great to see you.

CARLOS WATSON, CEO, CO-FOUNDER OZY.COM: Good to be here

CAMEROTA: It's nice to hear from Bill Gates because politicians have been saying we're late to the game, we didn't handle this right. He's impressed by the U.S. handling of Ebola.

WATSON: He is. There are two things he said that I thought were interesting. One was the involvement of the Department of Defense, saying that their logistical capabilities helping set up treatment centers and the like in West Africa is important. The other thing that he said that I thought, and it kind of saddened me a little bit, because he said remember, all of the energy that we're putting towards solving the Ebola crisis means that those kids, and often families, who are struggling from Malaria and other diseases, more of them will die from that. That's only exacerbated. So the importance of building overall health systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone, other West African countries.

PEREIRA: He's focused a lot on public access to health and education, obviously, but health. We also know his world of technology. Did you see a marrying of those things in the help that could be provided to Liberia and those other West African nations?

WATSON: He did. So, he spoke about it both as it related to Ebola, but also other diseases as well. So, with regard to Ebola, he was thinking about vaccines. Now, clearly that wouldn't be as much of a solution in the short term, although he was thinking about other kinds of therapeutics, and clearly he's funded a number of these efforts.

But when you start talking about some of the other opportunities, Malaria and other things, he had some crazy ideas. He had this once every year event called Grand Challenges, where he kind of challenges people to come up with solutions to help the 2 billion neediest. One of them was essentially tricking mosquitoes so that they no longer pass on diseases like Dengue Fever and Malaria. Some crazy ideas, some of them come up by not just scientist but, if you will, auto mechanics in Argentina and other places

PEREIRA: How about that?

WATSON: So, it was a wide open kind of kickstarter-like challenge.

CUOMO: Well, he's been pushing for a long time to make the United States recognize its interconnectiveness to the rest of the world. Ebola, as horrible as it is, is an opportunity for people here to understand that it matters what's happening somewhere else.

WATSON: Very much so. In fact, he's hoping this will be kind of a big public moment, and he sees an opportunity, not only with government leaders here but an opportunity for us to work with other governments, whether it's in West Africa, or other countries that are now being affected.

CAMEROTA: He also talked about some kind of new space age, new technology, but I'll let people check that out on your website, at ozy.com. You can see the whole interview there.

Carlos, great to see you.

WATSON: Good to be here. Good morning.

CUOMO: Always a pleasure. TGIF.

WATSON: TGIF. Here we are.

CUOMO: Maybe Carlos knows the answer to this, but nobody else does. Where is Kim Jong-Un? The North Korean leader M.I.A. at a key political event. Is he still in charge? Is he sick? What's going on? We have details for you at the top of the hour on "NEWSROOM" with Don Lemon, who's in for Carol Costello.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now in the CNN NEWSROOM, where is Kim Jong-Un? The North Korean leader not seen for more than a month. He fails to show up for a major event this morning. Who is running the country?

Also, markets tank. Biggest drop all year. European markets sliding south as well.