Comcast = Customer Service, NOT

Sometimes the littlest things make me SO angry. Last week, I came home from shopping to find a hang tag on my door "Sorry we missed you. Your cable modem is running slow and we came by to help. Call us. Comcast." So I called, to make sure it was a legit thing because I did NOT have an appointment scheduled with them. Yes, they said, my modem was having problems (fucking duh, it has been acting up for some time but not recently and I had certainly not called in with a problem). So, against my own counsel of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it..." I scheduled an appointment for yesterday.

Wonder of wonders, the service tech showed up at 8 AM, right at the beginning of the two hour appointment window (this never happens to me, does it happen to you?). He came in, ran a test on the command line in DOS to get the IP address and configuration and then said, "Your modem is slow. Let me get you a new one."

He comes back from the van with a sleek little number and I said, "Before you unplug anything, please know that my son has this all set up in a very intricate manner and it is for a reason. Please only unplug one cord at a time and put the cord into the same place on the new modem. Nope. Our rocket scientist unplugged everything and there were cords all over. Not only that, he could not remember where anything went. Now, I have a home network. A LAN. This LAN consists of a minimum of three running computers, one of which serves as a router. Then, we have the cable modem for internet, the D-Link modem for voice over IP (telephone) and a Linksys wireless router for the laptops. Of course everything was a jumbled mess when RS (for rocket scientist) unplugged the works. Took him almost two hours of scratching his head and playing with wires to get me up and running again.

And now we come to tonight. Twice this evening, the internet has gone down. Not the telephone VOIP, just the cable modem. And when you call Comcast, you get a lovely pre recorded message which says to log on to the internet to report your problem. God, nothing makes me madder than a message which means absolutely NOTHING. If I could log on to the net, I would not HAVE a problem. I unplugged, replugged, rebooted, and reset everything before I called Comcast the first time. Said RS mentioned he was going to remotely reboot the modem before I could say "wait, if you do that, we will lose the call..." Dial tone. Actually, no dial tone.

I called back and got another Tom Swifty. Gave him the same spiel and said, "I should give you my cell number so if we are cut off, you can call me back." "Actually, we are not allowed to make outgoing calls..." QUOI??????????? This time, I was the person who hung up.

I rebooted, reset, and reconfigged everything and finally, we have lift off but God only knows for how long? I think Comcast should wake up and smell the customer service call log. Fools.