{"id":1478,"date":"2007-10-22T05:02:20","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T10:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1478"},"modified":"2007-10-22T05:02:20","modified_gmt":"2007-10-22T10:02:20","slug":"attention-comcast-and-its-contractors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1478","title":{"rendered":"Attention, Comcast (And Its Contractors)"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day, this woman will be considered<\/a> a great pioneer; sort of like Rosa Parks or John Paul Jones:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mrs. Shaw:\u00a0 I’ll add my own.\u00a0 Everything described below rings totally true to me and, I’ll wager, most Comcast customers:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 Not, <\/em>mind you, my Comcast internet – a distinction about which I was painstakingly <\/em>clear.\u00a0 “We just need to put a filter on your line so that the internet will work without the cable”.\u00a0 Whatever.
\nAfter waiting a week, a Comcast contractor showed up, fiddled with the box out back, and split.\u00a0 The internet didn’t work. It took ten days for another contractor to show up – and he botched the job.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It took Comcast another day or so to actually make everything work.<\/p>\n

That, if you believe my friends who have Comcast, has been a fairly average timeline and number of visits.<\/p>\n

Back to Ms. Shaw:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Shaw, a churchgoing secretary of the local AARP branch, returned the next Monday – with a hammer.<\/p>\n

“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.”’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 <\/em>lower than it might have been.<\/p>\n

Because if there were even one Comcast customer on that jury, it might have been an acquittal.<\/p>\n

All<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In absolute terms?\u00a0 Of course.<\/p>\n

In that discombobulated nether world of the Comcast customer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}