Despite the fact that we’ve decided over time that we’re not willing to pay Comcast’s prices for cable television and telephone, we’ve never really been able to ditch them for high-speed internet service.  Frankly, there’s no real competition for them in this market.  AT&T offers U-Verse service (DSL) here, but it’s not really comparable.   I get really great throughput from Comcast (24 Gb/s up, 6 Gb/s down) and I’m not interested in finding another internet provider.

I’m also not interested in dealing with their customer service.  Ever.  While I’ve never been impressed with the customer service I get from Comcast, it’s not really any worse than what I get from AT&T or any other company that has grown big enough that it’s forgotten how to care about individual customers.

I went to work yesterday and returned home to a house with no internet service.  I went through the normal triage routine: power-cycling the cable modem and the router, rebooting the computers, but to no avail.  I called Comcast to find out if there was a service outage in my area and it just went downhill from there.

3:38PM (Call duration: 0:30:00)

Spoke to Tammy in Sales who pulled up my account immediately using my service address.  I don’t have a Comcast telephone number, and frankly, I don’t want to give them my cell number.  I sometimes get dumped into the Sales queue by their interactive voice response system.

Tammy transferred me to Rick, who spent 30 minutes looking for account.  He tried searching by my name and zip code, though he probably got my name wrong a half-dozen times.  He asked for my account number, but I can’t get to that without getting online and it seemed my internet service was down.

Rick tried our home address and after bumbling a half-dozen or so times also, got both the street number and name right, and then advised me there has never been service at this address.  That’s interesting.

He tried my Comcast email address before giving up, and after a number of iterations in which he got the email address wrong — it’s john.d.carr, which I didn’t think was all that complex — he eventually asked me to drive to an internet cafe and go online to look up my account number and call back.  I asked him if he thought that was a reasonable request and he muttered something about still looking for my account, and disconnected me.

4:09PM (Call duration: 1:34:00)

I called back and Sales answered again, pulling my account up immediately.  They transferred me to Maggie, who spent another 30 minutes looking for my account.  She tried my service address but said there were “too many names” at this address.  She tried the MAC address of my personally-owned cable modem  several times, but that didn’t work.

I convinced her to try my email address and she found my account.  I asked if it was under my name, and she told me it was, but when I asked why it wouldn’t have come up during her address search, she said she preferred not to discuss that.  Ok.

By this point, it had been 1:10:00 and she was able to look for an outage in my area.  There wasn’t one.

Maggie asked me when I picked up my Comcast cable modem; I told her that we’d discussed several times that it’s not Comcast equipment; I own my own modem, and have since August 2013.  Eventually she understood this and said that I would need to activate my new modem so it would work on their network.  I pointed out that it’s been working since I bought it in August.

Then she wanted to know the address where I wanted to transfer my new Comcast service.  Seriously, this was getting more and more bizarre by the minute.

Ultimately, she advised me that since the modem has never been added to account, it has never worked, and that’s why I haven’t had internet service since I bought it.  Whatever, I got tired of arguing with her and just asked her to activate my new modem.

Not surprisingly, Maggie wasn’t able to see my modem on their network — who knows what they’ve done to the setup by this point — and said she had scheduled a technician to come out between 9AM and 12PM on Saturday, and said she was transferring me to Tier 2 technician to see if they could help me set it up over the phone.  Eventually she told me technician would come out on Sunday between 10AM and 12PM (not sure what happened to the Saturday appointment), but that I would now get call back from a Tier 2 technician between 9AM and 12PM on Saturday.  There was no earlier appointment available for a technician to come out.

I asked to speak with a supervisor about the call with Rick and the length of time it took to find my account.  Maggie eventually told me that her supervisor would call me back but that she was not allowed to tell me the supervisor’s name.  I countered that I would prefer to stay on the phone with Maggie until the supervisor could come to the phone, at which point she said that Xenia would call me back within one hour.

That never happened.

The 9-12 window in which the Tier 2 technician was scheduled to call me also came and went.

At this point, I would respect Comcast more if they just called me and said, “Look, you can’t go anywhere else and we know this.  We’ll get to it when we get to it.  Stop bothering us about the fact that we’re giving you poor service.”

Update

It looks like somehow the cable modem was dumped from our account and adding it back may have fixed the problem.  I’ve had to do a factory reset on my router, but it looks like I’m back up and running.  Comcast obviously searches Google for negative feedback outside of social media channels (see comment below) so I’m hopeful that perhaps my escalation may end up resulting in some sort of coaching for the employees I’ve talked to over the past few days.  Maybe there’s hope after all?