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No where NEAR Comcastic!

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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.

Amazon.com’s MP3 Store and Killer Customer Service

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Recently, my beloved Yahoo Music Unlimited decided to shutter its doors and move all of us subscribers to Rhapsody. That’s all fine and dandy, but I thought that I might check out Amazon.com’s MP3 store as well for another alternative.

You see, Amazon has the support of all the major labels, and sells high bit-rate MP3 files with no DRM. That means I can download it and play it on pretty much any device out there without restriction. It’s the way music SHOULD be.

Anyway, I bought five albums last night and shuttled them over to my iPhone. When listening today, I realized that one of the albums I had bought was a CLEAN version. That basically means it was edited to take out the cuss words. In my case it changed the line “you’re such a fucking hypocrite” to “you’re such a little hypocrite.” Kinda changed the impact for me, and being a collector, I want originals anyway, not edited versions.

So I looked on Amazon and they made no mention of it being edited, they just had another version called EXPLICIT. Ahhhh, so if the album has bad words, it will say EXPLICIT. Cool, my bad. But I figured I would see if there was any way I could get the explicit version. So I sent a nice quick email to customer support to see if anything could be done. I also suggested that they might be able to allow us users to set a preference to only see the actual version or the clean version, or maybe make some denotation if the version you are buying is edited.

I fully expected a nice response saying sorry, but we can’t exchange downloaded MP3’s. I was surprised when i got this instead:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

 

I am sorry to learn that you have made an incorrect purchase. As a standard policy, Amazon MP3 Music Downloads are not returnable.

 

However, because of the circumstances I have made an exception and issued a refund in the amount of $9.99 for the item “Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces” by ‘Seether’. This refund should go through within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement.

 

Once the refund has been completed, I’d suggest you to return to our website and place an order for the correct album.

 

It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com. Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us. I’ve passed your feedback along to the Amazon MP3 Music team.

 

I hope that this is a satisfactory solution.

 

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Um, hell yeah. That solution exceeded my expectations by a mile, and as soon as I get home tonight I’ll be downloading the correct version and deleting the wrong one. Amazon.com has made it SO easy to buy and enjoy music. And after downloading your files, Amazon can put them right into iTunes or Windows Media Player for you.

If you need to buy music, I would really like you to try Amazon. You get higher quality files without DRM that can play anywhere, even on that iPod of yours. Don’t think you NEED to shop at iTunes for your music. You don’t. And if Amazon keeps up with customer service like this, they are going to steal a LOT of sales from Apple.