Tag Archives: Comcast

What Annoys Jeff this Week…

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Starting the week on Tuesday threw me off this week. In case anyone is wondering, that’s why What Annoys Jeff this Week didn’t make an appearance as scheduled this week. It’s a couple of days late this time around, but you surely didn’t think I’d pass the week without anything annoying did you? It’s been a short week, so the annoyance has been limited, but here’s what made the list:

The United States Postal Service. I assure you the 1 ounce of paint I’m trying to purchase is not intended as a weapon of mass destruction. All I want to do is touch up a ding on my rear fender. Call it toxic and hazardous if you want, but there’s no reason it should take a small package anywhere between one and three weeks to travel from Oregon to Maryland.

People who don’t take non-verbal hints. As a general rule, if you’re talking in my general direction and I’m not making eye contact I’m trying to give you a subtle hint that you can stop talking at any time. Same goes when you sand behind me and sigh hoping I’ll turn around and look interested. I’m a simple man. If you have to ask yourself if I’m interested, it’s a fair bet that I’m not.

Comcast. Your DVR sucks. It has sucked since the day you brought it here, but it especially sucks lately. As much as your helpdesk likes to think that powering off and waiting is a magical resolution to every problem, I have to tell you that it isn’t. I’m going to give you one chance to make things right and then I’ll call DirecTV. Lord knows they have their own issues, but I’ve never had the service problems with them I have with you.

Where credit is due…

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I was all set to come back to the house tonight and write a scathing rant about Comcast. Give their track record, I didn’t think they’d have a prayer of restoring service today. Happily, I would have been dead wrong in that assessment. So now I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. Less than 36 hours after the lines came down, I’m back up and running with TV and internet. No fuss, no resetting boxes, just walked in turned things on and the signal was there. Nice job, Comcast. You done good this time around and I appreciate that.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky and I’ll have something to rant about.

A message to Comcast…

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Dear Comcast,

We’ve had a long history. I’d love to say that we’ve stayed together because of your amazing products or first class customer service, but we both know it’s only because you’re effectively the only game in town in terms of “high speed” interment service.

All I wanted to do today was swap out my older-than-dirt cable modem for a brand spanking new model. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme, just trading one piece of hardware for another. Like everything else in the universe, I assumed that this would just be a plug and play experience… But you know better don’t you? You know how important it is that I call you and wade through your “automated customer support” menu before sitting on hold for 25 minutes waiting for a real person to come on the line so they could tell me that I needed to be transferred to someone in your “internet department.” The best part was then spending another 15 minutes on hold so I could manually provide a serial number to you.

This is the year 2010. Are you seriously going to tell me that somewhere deep in the bowls of the Comcast corporation there isn’t a computer that could have remotely interrogated my shiny new modem, figured out where it was on the planet, and tied it to my account? I mean it’s not like I’m standing up a supercomputer or a server farm over here. All I really want to do is be able to connect my MacBook Pro to washingtonpost.com and Facebook. Just seems like something we could have made happen without going through an hour long process. Of course you know better than I do, as technology is new and frightening.

I’m glad we’ve had this time together, because it’s reminded me just how much I’m looking forward to kicking you all the way to the curb as soon as I have half a chance. Have a great weekend.

Your friend,

Jeff