To Xfinity and beyond

Thirty minutes of my life that I’ll never get back were spent on the line (mobile, since being a Triple Threat Xfinity customer meant I had no phone, as well as Internet or TV service) yesterday with Comcast.

First of all trying to find out why the hell I had no phone, Internet or TV service. (According to Charles, some piece of equipment blew and hundreds of residences in the area were in the same sad, leaky boat with me.)

Then, after I told Charles that the instant I had connectivity I would be looking up satellite and U-Verse options to their crappy service, because I just then opened my cable bill to find they’d raised it $30 for no discernable reason. (As in: no added services.)

Well, after he told me that they were “sending some guy out to replace this equipment”, and that they wouldn’t commit to an ETA for resumption of service, he asked if I wanted to talk with someone in Customer Loyalty about my account. What the hell—not like I could watch reruns of Law & Order: SVU or check whether that Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil the lion illegally has been sighted anywhere in or out of the crosshairs.

The upshot of my call is that Comcast is graciously condescending to offer me the same rate I was paying for the last year (“That was a special offer, for one year only.”), but which now includes “premium” (not really) channels I’d been paying an extra $10/month for, and they’re sending me a new DVR which is presumably better than the five-year-old one I have. And it’s $10 less per month.

So, basically, because I called them on their greedy monopolistic arrogance, they’re being the good guys because they’re not screwing me as much as their business model calls for. But I’m sure they’ll make up for it by screwing someone else; probably 40 someone elses.

(As an aside, I was somewhat surprised but not a little pleased to discover that one of my neighbors not only has an unsecured "guest" Wi-Fi network, but that they're also clearly not using Comcast as their ISP. So I was able to follow the tweets about that lion-murdering bastard after all.)

But that’s not really why I’m writing this. My all-too-typical conversation with Comcast reminded me of something I saw a couple of weeks ago around Sunnyvale:

I see plenty of security service notices in the yards of million-dollar houses here in the Valley They Call Silicon. But this is the first one I’ve ever come across from Comcast. And my first thought when it registered in my brain was, “Wow—who’d contract with the company with the crappiest customer service record ever to provide a critical, time-sensitive response service? Who?”

(This is precisely what I wonder every time I see a TV commercial for Comcast home protection services.)

Plus—if these people’s alarm system is connected to the cable infrastructure, it was kaput along with everyone else’s phone, TV and Internet.