Boycott Comcast!!! Part 2: Their "Technical Support"

Now that you have gone through the unnecessarily difficult step of setting up a service appointment, the wait begins. The way I see it, all Comcast "technicians" must go through extensive training. After all, it is impossible to be that that completely incompetent without learning from some sort of expert! Here are The Rules of Being a Comcast Service Technician:

1. To be on time is to provide good customer service, so don't do it at any costs. The fact remains that no matter what time you schedule your service appointment for, they will be late. And by late, I mean they won't show up, making you have to call their idiotic customer service hotline, which is useless (unless you're looking to raise your blood pressure). In fact, by the time the technician gets to your abode, you don't even want cable anymore, but you've made the effort, gone through hell, and now it's a matter of pride. Little do you know your adventure is just beginning...

2. If you speak no English, you're more likely to upset the customer, which is good. When the technician finally calls to give you a time estimate, you're very lucky if he speaks English because he's going to get lost and will need help. It may or may not be corporate policy to send the English-speaking technicians to nonEnglish-speaking households. Starting a signal fire on your roof or living next door to the person tend to help things. [Blogger's note: I have a friend moving soon. As a housewarming gift, I'm giving him Spanish and Swaheli-to-English Dictionary, so he can communicate with Comcast.]

3. If you mess up the initial installation, the company still makes money, and you will still have a job as a technician. This is just good business from a technician's end. It's win-win for Comcast, and the customer loses. This seems to be Comcast's corporate mission... Case and point: a good friend of mine ordered Comcast in Silver Spring. The service tech was 5 hours late, then determined her digital converter box wasn't working, so she didn't get the product she ordered. When the technician left, the cable was super fuzzy, and it started to get worse. After a week of waiting for a new appointment, a more experienced person came out and determined that the installer had hooked her cable up to Starpower (a competing cable service), which was why the cable box didn't work!

4. Regardless of whether you can help or not, make up any excuse you can to not provide service. It's more frustrating for the customer that way. This can be accomplished in many ways. You could say that the building's wiring is faulty, or the cable jacks don't work. Or, if the technician sees subscribe to a rival service, blame them. My current housemates and I decided to free ourselves from the idiocy of a Comcast cable subscription, but we still agreed to overpay for high speed internet. When our technician arrived, the DirecTV was set up. The Comcast tech told us he could not set up internet because the DirecTV guy had "used all of the cable ports" in the house. Hmm... our high speed internet couldn't be set up because the satellite television used the cable ports. Does this sound retarded to anyone else?

5. If you haven't pissed off the customer, you really aren't trying. The newest Comcast BS. Barking Bug miraculously "lost" some of his HD channels. Because he has a sweet TV, he overvalues the HD signal. However, like me, he highly undervalues Comcast in general and has agreed that they must be obliterated. Anyway, Barking Bug called up the retards in the customer service center and convinces them (after 40 minutes of moaning) to send a technician out. The guy arrives yesterday (4/15), looks at the TV, looks at the cable box, and says, "I don't know what's wrong. I'm not sure why they sent me out here. I can't help you." and left. Oh, I'm sorry. Your job is supposed to be finding problems, determining a solution, and fixing them. Excuse the rest of the world for expecting you to be able to help...