In the middle of Comcast Hell, once again.

It’s January 10, 2015 and I’m coming back home and looking at a Comcast bill that is giving us nothing of what we were promised in December.

We called Comcast in December 2015. We called because:

1. We were being billed for a Arris cable modem we owned (see my previous Comcast article).
2. We wanted to get a cheaper plan (Bundle) than the one we currently had.

After some conversations with the billing agents, we had them check for how long we had been billed for our cable modem. It had been a year. We were promised a $115 rebate on our misbilling on our next bill.

Our next bill has arrived. No such rebate in sight.

The fellow who “fixed” our cable modem issue then set us up with a lady who promised a bundle that would have been about $20-$30 cheaper than the bundle we had at the time.

But looking at the bill, the plan we are on now is actually $30 more expensive.

This kind of incompetence has been “par for the course” over the last few days. The same lady who gave us a ‘cheaper plan’ set us up with a new DVR. But when calling about the DVR, Comcast said we had 5 devices in our house. No, we have 3. One in an upstairs bedroom, one in a living room, and one in a basement. If Comcast can’t keep straight what devices are in my house, how can they properly bill us?

This is going to be living hell. It will take many man hours to straighten out. If we don’t get the rebate we deserve and were promised, I’m thinking small claims court. Maybe if we sue the company, we can get part of the money they’ve taken from us without cause.

 

The pain that is Comcast, and the pleasure that is the Three Dollar Cafe, Roswell GA

I’m sitting in the Three Dollar Cafe, an eatery on Roswell Road that looks good and is favored by the early afternoon staff of 680 the Fan, among others. So I’ve stopped there to eat and call Comcast, and see what we can do about getting my mother-in-law TV Japan.

I’ve been unable to get to a human being 2-3 times while trying to call Comcast. It’s not that I’m trying to get a problem fixed even (gory details below). I’m just trying to order new service. Finally, I decide that they’re going south on me because I’m refusing to take their service interview. So I say “yes” this time, and hope for the best.

The Three Dollar Cafe is good looking inside, and this place could easily call itself a diner or a sports bar, or a bar and grill. There are plenty of televisions and a lot of good solid wooden seating. The menu is roughly that of a place that deals in beer, sports, and food. There are a lot of sandwiches, wings are prominently featured, a Yuengling ad covers a big chunk of wall space and I count 6 taps near my table.

My food finally arrives. It’s a grilled grouper sandwich. The bun is toasted and the fish has a bit of crunch to it where the fish was thin. If I ask for a drink, I rapidly get a drink. Service is good. Staff is polite. Waitstaff wear black clothes, usually a black tee with the “Three Dollar Cafe” logo on the shirt.

I try to resist the fries, as in theory I’m on a diet. They’re thick, in the Texas style and meaty. It’s no use, I’m just too hungry. They are good, the Three Dollar fries, or maybe it’s that I’m just too mad to care.

As I hang up, once again, when there is no sound and no reply and no way to figure out what happened to my call, I get this callback. Comcast wants to know how the call went. Oh, that’s easy. Too bad they don’t have a zero on their one to five scale.

Verdict: Three Dollar Cafe is a nice place to get a burger or sandwich, a beer and watch a little TV. Highly recommended in that context.

Three Dollar Cafe
8595 Roswell Rd
Atlanta, GA 30350
(770) 992-5011

The Gory Details

In General: Comcast’s service is horrible. No other word for it, but horrible. If you manage to get someone and get a service call set up, they don’t show up at all about half the time, and on a first service call, they almost never show up. On a second call, they’re usually embarrassed and they show up about half the time, but are almost invariably late. There is a take home lesson to this, which is never to use personal leave for a Comcast service call. If you do, they’ll waste your leave. The second lesson is to never schedule an afternoon appointment, as the later the appointment the more likely it is they will never show up.

In Specific: Since about December 2007, I’ve been losing TV channels, largely HD channels. It started with Fox and Turner (804 and 807). By now I have less than half the HD channels I’m supposed to have.  Over time I’m losing more and more channels, and not just HD channels. The Military Channel (220) is also gone now. One or two channels a quarter disappear, and every new HD channel they’ve added in the last six months is a “no go” on my service. It took a couple calls to get people to actually check this, back in December 2008 (first time no one showed, second time the tech ran late), and I was told it was a problem outside. When the tech directly connected my service to the wire, there simply wasn’t any signal on 804, HD Fox. Our tech worked hard, called his boss, and the next day they worked on it all day. It was outside, I was told. I was also told that on day three it would be fixed. And on day three we received an early morning call to check on us and after that Comcast no longer said or did a thing. We could see no change to the problem at all.

I called the middle of the next week and got the kind of help desk “professional” I would have preferred to avoid. Not only did he have no record of the previous work, in order to get this issue fixed I was going to have to pay a fee to get a technician out to my house – again. In short, Comcast not only completely forgot about the repair work they had already done, but they also were demanding payment to start the repair from scratch. And would they give us a discount for one year of less-than-stellar signal? You could forget about that.

I have dealt with Comcast on a “only if no other choice” circumstance since. And if my neighbor didn’t have trees blocking my southern view, I’d probably have switched to satellite long ago.

Let me point out, this failure by Comcast isn’t a technical issue. It’s a failure at the management layer.  A service tech out in the field can’t make a call center remember what repairs have already done. The people who manage the problems have to do that. They have no one a customer can point to who will manage a problem end to end. I’ve come to believe that’s by design. With a couple rare exceptions, the people running Comcast really don’t want to fix anything.

Update 10-06-2009

Finally got a voice on the phone. Donnie checked the line, checked the box. To get TV Japan, we have to have a working “On Demand” and “Premium”, and my daughter tells me we lost “On Demand” after a storm. Donnie scheduled someone to show in the morning on Thursday, so I have my fingers crossed. Give me 2 to 3 more people of the caliber of Donnie and these issues may be resolved. Further updates will be in the comments section.