Comcast

Good morning from your capitol city, America. I’m a big fan of how the DC bars get in the mood for St. Patrick’s Day. When else can I walk into any bar at 7:30am and get a beer? Well, there are a few, but it feels more disreputable when you’re not pretending to be Irish.

But I’m not posting to talk about that! I’m posting a rant that I wrote on cocktail napkins this morning at the Dubliner on Capitol Hill.

The one thing I hate about my new apartment is that I’m forced to use Comcast.

Now, I’m not fooling myself – internet in the US is about 10 years behind the rest of the world, so every company is the same. Whatever. And why do we defend these companies, by the way? Just like with our primitive cell phone technology, we always fall back on, oh, the US is big and has lots of people – not like those other countries in the world that are all the size of Rhode Island! It’s hard to put up towers and get online!

Hey – idiots! Siberia has better internet and cell coverage. Most of Russia does, and their army has to have a weekly bake sale to get paid. And when it comes to vast tracts of nothingness, I think those filthy Russkies have us beat. Our internet and cell coverage sucks because we’re run by monopolies. And we’re brain dead fuck-up luddites. Everyone’s too busy working 12 hours a day and rushing home to watch repeats of Friends while sucking down their cocktail of psycho-enhancing drugs. We’ve all learned TiVo just so we can keep up with Survivor, and that’s the limit of technology in America.

Talking like this makes me want to go blow up a Czar. But I can’t even do that! Again, thanks to the Russians.

When I moved a couple years ago, it took me more than two months of constant calls to Verizon to get them to sort out my internet. I mean, every day, another person telling me they didn’t understand what was happening. It was stressful and insane. However, I never had to deal with technician visits, and, once they got it working, that was it.

Here I moved again last November and, even though, from my balcony, I can clearly see the Verizon equipment servicing the rich people’s townhouses just down the street, they told me that service was not available to my address. Knowing Comcast to be in league with the devil, I tried other companies…no luck. Comcast – no problem! So I took a morning off and waited for the tech to come by, which was some old school cable company “I’ll be there sometime within the next 80 hours” bullshit. When he arrived, I bitched about Verizon, and he laughed, then admitted right there that Comcast had an exclusive deal with my apartment’s management company. Isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that the very definition of a monopoly?

The service lasted about a week before the cable modem gave out and they had to send in a new tech, who told me the same thing during idle conversation…and also told me that the first guy set everything up incorrectly.

I managed a couple months that time before I had to put in another service call. This time, the lady was able to fix shit from her end. And, this week, I put in yet another service call. Again something they had to do on their end. It must be good having no competition, eh? Faulty equipment, untrained technicians, and bad service all around.

Service calls to Comcast are something I’m not used to. That two months it took Verizon to set me up saw me talking with dozens of reps in increasingly “escalated” situations, as customer service people like to say. Yet I always left with the feeling that I was dealing with morons. It was the timid way they backed away from escalation, and the sort of general dimness that crept into their voices as soon as I said the word “internet.”

Comcast is far different. They hate you. They’re also geniuses, and they don’t take shit. I start to escalate because I’m getting stonewalled and they cut me off and scold me back into submission.

As a customer service monkey myself, I’m somewhat in awe of Comcast. How I would love to treat my customers the way Comcast treats me. What astounds me is when my company’s customers complain about the service department. We’re dealing with a specialized membership, it’s very intimate and secure, managers are always available, we cave in left and right and give them whatever they want, and we can idly sit on the phone while they spend 20 goddamn minutes trying to open a simple webpage on their computer that isn’t even on. I wish we could open up on some of these freaks

Shit, we stay with a customer during a fire alarm. This is where I should condemn the author who gave me a hard time for not resolving her problem on 9/11 when they evacuated our building. She called about five minutes before we were all rushed outside, so this was the height of the what-the-fuck-panic that permeated that morning. She then sent an email to all of my supervisors that same day, which I’ll paste below. (I like changing my name to “Nacho.” It makes me feel like there’s a sort of Jekyll & Hyde thing going on.)

From: XXXXX
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 7:54 PM
To: XXXXX
Subject: Re: calls

Hi, Wonder if you can do me a favor? I tried to order some of the
new editions from the order office and after a few too many mishaps, was told by Nacho that it was not listed as something orderable. Nacho did not seem inclined to do much more investigating hence this message. Also Borders in Ann Arbor [its headquarters] does not have it on its shelves and school has begun with some parents eager to have the new version…….so I say HELP!!!!!

Thank you. Hope all is well. As for Nacho……I hope tomorrow is a better day.

All the best

I’d tell you her name, but that’s a good way to get in trouble. Here’s a hint, though.

We all had a laugh at that, but, still, it’s that sort of entitlement that I deal with…oh, how many calls do I get a week? A few hundred?

In her case, I was not inclined to help because people were on their knees praying in the hallway, the computers were down, and our bosses were going from door to door telling us to get out of the building.

By the way – so much for planned evacuation, and all those wasted fire drills. During my time at this job, we’ve had two legitimate emergencies. 9/11 and an actual fire down in the loading dock. Each of those times it was every man for himself, using the elevators, nobody to herd us, and handicapped people stranded in the upper floors.

Which is why, whenever we have a fire drill, I walk over to the bar across the street and don’t check in with the emergency rep for my floor.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Comcast. I can just imagine what a Comcast sales rep would’ve said to that author on 9/11. My version of customer service is to desperately try to excuse myself while the radio reports imaginary bombs going off throughout the city and breaks down into total Red Dawn mode. That gets me in trouble. Instead I should have said, bitch, I gotta go. How about you go back to the Borders Super Mega Headquarters and fucking ask them to order your fucking book. One thing’s for sure – that Ann Arbor store isn’t currently under attack!