Attention, Comcast (And Its Contractors)
By Mitch Berg
One day, this woman will be considered a great pioneer; sort of like Rosa Parks or John Paul Jones:
She was fined and got a suspended jail sentence, but Mona Shaw says she has no regrets about using a hammer to vent her frustration at a cable company.
“I stand by my actions even more so after getting all these telephone calls and hearing other people’s complaints,” she told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.
Mrs. Shaw: I’ll add my own. Everything described below rings totally true to me and, I’ll wager, most Comcast customers:
Shaw, 75, and her husband, Don, say they had an appointment in August for a Comcast technician to come to their Bristow home to install the company’s heavily advertised Triple Play phone, Internet and cable service.
The Shaws say no one came all day, and the technician who showed up two days later left without finishing the setup. Two days after that, Comcast cut off all their service.
Once, during one of my experiments (the TV “broke” for the summer, in a successful effort to spur my kids to read more), I tried to turn off the Cable. Not, mind you, my Comcast internet – a distinction about which I was painstakingly clear. “We just need to put a filter on your line so that the internet will work without the cable”. Whatever.
After waiting a week, a Comcast contractor showed up, fiddled with the box out back, and split. The internet didn’t work. It took ten days for another contractor to show up – and he botched the job. I called the company, and told yet another indifferent “customer account executive” that I’d prefer if they’d send actual Comcast techs this time. It took Comcast another day or so to actually make everything work.
That, if you believe my friends who have Comcast, has been a fairly average timeline and number of visits.
Back to Ms. Shaw:
At the Comcast office in Manassas later that day, they waited for a manager for two hours before being told the manager had left for the day, the Shaws say.
Shaw, a churchgoing secretary of the local AARP branch, returned the next Monday – with a hammer.
“I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor … and I went to hit the telephone,” Shaw said. “I figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.”’
While I must on principle eschew this sort of violence and vandalism, and point out that the court system was right to impose consequences, I’ll bet the sentence was a lot lower than it might have been.
Because if there were even one Comcast customer on that jury, it might have been an acquittal.
All
Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, disputes Shaw’s version of its customer service record and calls Shaw’s hammer fit on Aug. 20 an “inappropriate situation.”
In absolute terms? Of course.
In that discombobulated nether world of the Comcast customer?
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:58 am
I have an elderly friend with phone/internet and possibly cable service who swears a Comcast or Qwest tech unsuccessfully adjusted a hardware configuration on the physical modem card after it had been installed inside her computer and disrupted her computer somehow.
She accused him of accessing data on her computer and he never came back.
I only have experience with Qwest internet service. I am not aware of any hardware settings on the internal Qwest DSL modem. Maybe it’s different for the Qwest digital phone service or for one of the services of Comcast. In general I trust and prefer Qwest.
Qwest’s internet hardware architecture enables the techs to be hands-off and non-intrusive while Comcast’s hardware architecture may not. In fact one Qwest tech was so confident I didn’t need a tech to find a brand new line coming into the patch panel of my condo that he refused to dispatch a free install tech despite my kicking and screaming. He said I had to hire an electrician (?@#!) to find THEIR brand new wire. I had to bring my DSL modem with it’s green DSL indicator down to the maintenance room with a modified phone cord and go down each unassigned incoming wire. That’s how hands-off they are! It actually worked quite well and the customer service rep was right. But he was a bit cocky. No electrician would be able do it any other way other than trial and error. The extra incoming phone lines to a 40 unit blg like mine are a hodge podge that Qwest may have had maps for at one time but they do not anymore.
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:29 am
Comcast seems to search for inept techs. My last company paid for cable internet and since I already had satellite I called the cable company to get Internet ONLY. Short version: the third time they came out the tech heard the horror stories and pulled the filter they put on to attempt to give me Internet only and things worked fine. (Just how hard is it to run a power level check after you put a filter on the line anyway? *grumble* Ijits. *grumble*) After that, I just went out to make sure some new tech didn’t put the filter back on the box after servicing someone else’s cable.
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
It isn’t just Comcast. I had an outlet finally installed in my bedroom last fall. Charter sent out a contract service tech/installer. He drilled through the wall, severing the telephone wire in the process, and concluded by drilling beyond the inside wall several inches, right into the bedside chest. It was an “uff da” moment.
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:01 am
The scary thing is that Comcast used to be worse. Waiting 48 hours for a tech of appropriate level (read ‘can do more than read a script’) to fix (read ‘configure properly, on their end’) a new install was typical.
That said, Qwest hasn’t been too good to me. They seemed to have forgotten a couple bridge taps on the line from the CO to my house, so they accepted an order and ran a new pair of pairs from the pole to my house. When they “remembered” (more likely “rediscovered”) that problem they promptly disappeared, canceling the order and notifying nobody (not even the ISP). “Spirit of Service” indeed. 😉
October 24th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
When we bought the house, Comcast couldn’t just transfer the prior owner’s service into our name. Instead, they came to hook up our service and decided the cable from the power pole hit the back of the house in the wrong place – it wasn’t “code” so they had to move it, for an additional fee. Two weeks of frustrating “it still doesn’t work” calls later, they came back, decided the cable hit the house in the wrong place, and Moved It Back . . . for an additional fee!
That’s when satellite started looking better and better.
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