Jason Murphy

Did I Win? (Comcast)

Sep 13, 2008 Blog General

Umph.

Past two days were frustrating to say the least. On Thursday evening I had a nicely done blog post all written up about some of the additional troubles I am facing with Comcast. I’ve been using Opera on my Blackberry because it simply out-rocks the BB default browser. But for whatever reason, this time when I used Opera to type my post and hit submit, it crashed on me and puked a javascript error.

So I typed a shorter version and tried again. Bam. Same error.

Frustrated, I said F* IT and went to bed.

The following day I woke up with some residual resentment to my ISP, mostly since I missed a day of blogging. On Thursday, we arranged for a tech to come to our house on Friday between 2 and 5. Thursday afternoon, their help desk called me and “confirmed” this appointment.

My wife sat home waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Finally 6 o’clock bore round and she called Comcast to ask what the hold up was. “We’re sorry ma’am, we don’t show you as having an appointment today?” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! This was mentioned on at least 3 phone calls with their call center, AND they called me the day before to confirm the appointment. Well, my wife went nuclear on them and they promised to come out the next morning.

I came home from work and noticed that more lights were blinking (”Yah, das blinkenlights!”) on the modem. Hopeful, I called Comcast to see if they could ping the modem. The first time, the tech who sounded extremely sleepy (it was about 11:00 PM by the time I called them) put me on hold for about 5 minutes while she “worked on my modem”. Without warning, the hold music turned into the voice-prompt operator and I was back at the front of the phone tree. I went through the hoops again, told the tech that the call was dropped when the other tech was working on my modem, and was put on hold again. This time, it was only about 30 seconds and my call was dropped completely. I called again and refused to be put on hold while they worked on my modem. This tech was actually nice and friendly, unlike the other two who really sounded irritated that I’d call them and ask for them to do their job (tech support). She understood and obliged my request to stay on the line. She talked me through the steps she was doing and realized that she couldn’t get access to my modem at all. She said it was Offline. As in non-existent. I said that’s ok, I have a tech coming in the morning. But when she went to look at the appointment to confirm it, she informed me that no one was coming Saturday morning and the earliest they could make it was Monday. I was furious but I realized that it wasn’t the tech’s fault so I graciously thanked her for her help (she was by far the most helpful), hung up and made a series of calls to AT&T and Earthlink to check DSL prices. I then went to bed. I wasn’t about to try to blog on a thumbpad after that series of events. I was already at the end of my rope and I didn’t care if it didn’t happen.

Saturday, I wake up and take my son to get a haircut and some McDonald’s. We take our lunches and go to my office. What can I say? A net junkie needs his fix. He thought it was cool that I had “3 computers!” (but it was really just three monitors) and really liked the music we listened to. I actually had some work items I needed to follow-up on, but while I was there I did check on other ISPs in the area. Seems like fixed wireless is not a popular choice of access in South Florida. I understand with all the storms they have here.

When we got home I decided to play with the cable modem some more. Since the modem was found to be offline by the tech from the night before, I thought it might be the jack it was plugged into. I take it into the middle of the living room by the TV, plug it in, and sure enough I have full-on Internet.

Don’t you hate it when you have deal with a ton of shit for no good reason?

Tags: comcast, shit