No where NEAR Comcastic!

I don’t know why I’m surprised at all, but this week Comcast went above and beyond in annoying the living hell out of me, and leaving me without service. Here’s my tale. Please feel free to send a link to anyone you know considering using Comcast as their cable provider. Hopefully they run screaming.

First off, I have cable internet, as well as cable TV with two DVR’s. I use Vonage (NOT Comcast) as my VOIP provider. My Comcast monthly bill is $167. Yup, $167. So when I pay that much, I kinda expect things to work. Never mind that my DVRs (which cost more than TiVo) lock up all the time and pause unexpectedly for pretty much no reason. I don’t even care about that at this point… I’ll just get back to tale of woe in bullet point form:

• Tues 1PM Cable TV and Internet are out. No TV, no internet, no home phone
• Tues 3PM I call Comcast. They state there are no outages in my area and they will need to send someone out. Thursday between 4-7PM. Over 48 hours from the time of the call. Fine.
• Tues 3:15PM I go outside to look at the cable to the pole and find that it’s still connected to my house fine, but the connection broke at the top of the telephone pole next door. The cable is laying in my neighbor’s driveway.
• Tues 3:30PM I call Comcast back to tell them that the cable is broke at the pole and see if we can expedite the tech. The customer service rep says he can send someone out the next morning between 10 and 1 but there’s a catch. He’s only coming out to verify that the cable is broke and he’ll call in the work order and the next tech will still come out on Thursday at 4PM.

Okay, so basically they are sending someone to my house to look at the cable on the ground and go ‘Ayup, this here cable be broken’ It’s tantamount to calling me a liar, and I don’t see HOW this can benefit Comcast at all. And if the tech is on site, don’t you think he might be able to fix it? And if he can’t, WHY send him out at all.

• I get off the phonecall dumbfounded. But fine, I’ll wait my 48 hours.
• Thurs 1:49PM Comcast calls my cell phone to make sure someone will be at my home at 4PM for the appointment. I miss the call in the 60 seconds it took me to put my coffee mug away at work. No matter, the Comcast rep said they would call back closer to the time to make sure I would be there.
• Thurs 4:15PM Haven’t received a call, so I figure I’ll call just to make sure they know I’m home. I get a rep, and he says everything’s fine, I’m still scheduled.
• Thurs 4:30PM Comcast calls my wife (my home Vonage forwards to her cell phone when the internet connection is down.) They tell her that a technician cannot make it to my house tonight and are re-scheduling for Friday at 10AM to 1PM. My wife pretty much lets them have it, explaining that I took a half day off of work to be home for this, and that tomorrow we won’t be home during that time, and that it’s unacceptable. She talked to a supervisor and told the supervisor how we would not be home and they could fix it at the pole anyway. They supervisor agrees, but never apologizes.
• Thurs 4:40PM My wife calls to tell me the situation. I call Comcast and talk to a rep and explain the whole situation. Apologies all over the place and she will transfer me to a dispatch supervisor. I wait on hold for about five minutes and another rep picks up. My call is back at customer service. I have to explain the whole thing over again to the new rep, and she tries to transfer me. No dice. So she apologizes again and puts in a Escalation ticket and promises me a supervisor will call me back shortly.

At this point I wanted blood, but I tried to be as nice as I could be to the rep. She was only the messenger. I did tell her this though: ‘I have absolutely no faith that someone will call me back tonight.’ She seemed surprised at that, and assured me they would.

• Thursday late: I go to bed, still haven’t received a call.
• Friday somewhere in the 8AM timeframe We get a call to make sure we’ll be home. We tell them no, we won’t. We explain that the problem was at the pole and we told the supervisor that the night before and they agreed to come out and fix it without us being home.
• Friday 10:15AM A rep calls my wife to let her know there is a technician at our door waiting. She explains AGAIN that we told them that we would not be there, that the problem was at the pole and they needed to fix it. They rep said okay. Apparently the onsite tech goes to work (we hope)
• Friday 11:26AM A supervisor calls regarding the ticket from the night before asking what he can do. My simple answer was, nothing at this point, the tech is already at the site. I did ask him to check status and he said the tech was still at my location.

So that’s where we are currently. I may be back up, I dunno. I’ll find out when I get home at 6:30PM tonight. Given my experience, I’m not confident in the least.

An interesting thing about all of this was that I bitched about Comcast on Twitter and was almost immediately followed by @comcastcares. He asked to help. It’s funny if you look at his Twitter stream, it’s nothing but apologies. I will give them credit on trying to manage things this way. I will be emailing him with a link to this post.

If you want more reasons for my frustration, feel free to read my Comcast Helpless Desk post from awhile ago. I’ll let you know how this gets resolved. But even if I get home and everything is working, I’m absolutely disgusted at the process and don’t have a very high opinion of Comcast at this point. Dunno if Frank can help or not.