Comcast sux

[xoxoxoBruce]

Tuesday night when the power went out, I was online. Since I have an APC power supply, I finished what I was working on, maybe 8 or 10 minutes, and the Comcast cable was still working. When the power came back Wednesday morning, the cable was dead...no TV, no ISP.

I called Comcast, went through the phone menu and got to the, “...calls will be answered in the order they are received...”, part. Waiting my turn is fine, I can handle that, but having to listen to a recording extolling the wonderful features Comcast provides, or will provide for an extra few jillion dollars a month, while the cable doesn’t work at all, is annoying.

Then the recording tells me I don’t have to wait on hold, I can just go directly to there website. Helloooo...no I can’t...the damn thing doesn’t work!

But the most annoying of all, is every recorded message, and each live person, starts with, “Thank you for calling Comcast.” Duh.... it is a monopoly. Who in hell would I be calling when my Comcast cable doesn’t work? Screaming Verizon, at orgasm, while being screwed by Comcast, is bad form.

Anyway, I finally get a live person and explain who & where I am and tell him the power’s back, but the cable is dead. He responds, it shouldn’t be, there’s no outage in my area and they’ll send a tech out. Cool.

Four hours later I get a call from the repair office asking if my service has healed itself. No.
Four hours later I get a call from the repair office asking if my service has healed itself. No. (no, that’s not a repeated sentence)
One minute later I get a call from the repair office asking if my service has healed itself. No.

Wednesday, about 9pm, I called Comcast and after the phone menu and waiting, I got a live person. I explained what had transpired, she put me on hold and called repair. Five minutes later she said repair had her on hold and she would call me back. Twenty minutes later she called me and said repair was doing their best but the whole area was out and they didn’t know how long it would take.
Great! It wasn’t good news but it was finally the truth. Thank you!

Thursday at work, everyone I talked to said their cable had come back on. Two people told me their power was still off but they had generators and their cable was working. So, when I got home and my cable was out, I called Comcast and went through the dog & pony show again. He told me it should be working and they’d send somebody out. About 6pm the cable came on so I went outside but there was nobody there. Fifteen minutes later the repair tech shows up but doesn’t know why it hadn't been working.....or why it now was.

Friday, on the way home from work, I saw 3 Comcast trucks working on the line, a quarter mile from home. My cable was on, but as I started going through my email, it died. I walked down to where they were working, to ask if they had killed it, but they were gone.
After negotiating the phone gauntlet and recapping the week, Kenesha (sp?) tells me she’ll give me a $10 credit. I explained I wasn’t after a credit, I wanted to know why the cable was out and when it would be fixed.

She said there was a big storm and they were working to get everyone back online. Well duh, like I didn’t know that, but I had already been back on line for 24 hours and this was a new outage for me.

She said there were crews working in my area, so I asked her where they were working? She said she was transferring my call to her supervisor and after being on hold for 5 minutes I get the supervisor’s voice mail. Grrrrrr.

No choice but to vent to this person’s voice mail until the cable came back......40 minutes later. Yes, 40 minutes on voice mail.

Since the cable came back on Friday evening, it’s been going off periodically, for an hour or two at a time.

In fairness to Comcast, this was a very damaging storm over a wide area, and they had a lot of fixing to do. But, when you’re the 800 lb monopoly, making billions in profit, there comes the responsibility to be equipped to handle subsequent maintenance and repair in a timely manner.

That said, probably the guys in the field were working their butts off, understaffed, long hours under difficult and often dangerous conditions.

I have a number of issues with Comcast’s business plan of continually adding new “features and services,” I don’t want, but I’m forced to pay for because they are a monopoly. But ironically, this communications company’s biggest failure, is communicating. Don’t lie to me!