Sunday, February 22, 2009

Sickness and Comcast

I think my title may make for a great book title someday. It was meant to highlight the disappearance of your favorite blog author. No, me. I'm currently fighting a cold. Well, not so much fighting, as watching it move from my head and settle quite happily in my chest. Awesome. Then the internet and cable went out in my house for a week. I called right away, but much like UPS, they fail to deliver or arrive when working human beings are home. They offered me a 11-1 appointment the next day. Riiight, because we all work next door to our house.

Anyway, I loathe Comcast. Perhaps not so much as the guy that set up this website, but I really don't like them.


So let me explain what has probably happened to you if your cable and internet go out at the same time. This has happened to me twice with these boobs, so I am a quasi-expert on this.

You probably think that your cable comes in from the street to that box under your TV and that's where the problems lie. False. In fact your cable starts on a pole on in a junction box in your apartment. Each apartment has it's own wire going to the mother cable source. These wires are labeled with your apartment on it. Over time the labels can fall off or a person who knows the system and wants to get free cable can just rip off the tags to confuse the Comcast tech.

The tech is not confused. Well, no more than Frankenstein was by fire in Young Frankenstein. They simply pull all the wires out. But you're asking, "Doesn't that mean everyone's cable goes out?" Yes. Yes it does.

Then I call Comcast to report a loss of all services and they see that I'm a paying customer and send out a tech to reattach the wires and label mine. The guy who was stealing obviously isn't going to call, so that's how they weed out the problem. Comcast calls it "Disconnect in Error." I call it "Disconnect on Purpose." The tech who came to fix it is like, "You should have told them this was a Disconnect in Error. I'm on call until 10PM, and I would have come out that night."

Then I saw red. See Comcast is smart. They have insane policies and moronic customer service, but it's never the person who you're talking to's fault. The poor tech bears most of the anger, but it's not his fault he works for a souless awful company.

I do have an idea Comcast on a revenue generator. What if you charged people $25 extra to come when normal people were home? I'd pay $25 for them to come from 7-10PM easy. I bet others would too. This is a slam dunk and if you're listening Comcast, I want a piece of this action.

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