UPDATE ^2 (8/15): The two man crew arrived early (they called first). It took them longer to climb the ladder up the pole than it did to fix our problem. Thank you comcast cares for hookin’ us up!

UPDATE (8/14): I tweeted a link to this post last night hoping that the people from Comcast who monitor twitter would see it. They did, as you can read in the comments section. I sent an email this morning at Frank Eliason’s suggestion detailing the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, even including my unfortunate show of temper and hangup on that customer service agent.

Someone from Comcast corporate called me late this morning to apologize. She moved the service appointment up to tomorrow instead of Sunday and gave me her direct phone number. That response scored some major points with me. I still think it unfortunate that it was necessary to raise a holy stink about it, but the response I got reassures me that there are people at Comcast who take even the issues of relatively insignificant customers like me seriously. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I arrived home from my mail route today to find 2 messages from comcast confirming my appointment for between 12-4.

BRRRRAAAKKKK!

Survey said, between 5-9pm. That’s what the customer service guru told me last night, but it apparently was not what she wrote on the service ticket. What she also failed to write was the cell phone number I gave her, even though she repeated it back to me before we hung up last night. That’s why they called the home phone, I learned later.

Comcast sent a tech out at about 1pm. That was the second message: there was no one home at 1pm.

When I called comcast to get them to rectify their mistake, their implication was that I was the one who was in the wrong. Hmmm… let’s see. Tech comes out to fix internet, succeeds in doing that but gets rid of cable tv signal in process. Customer requests another tech and plans day around promised evening appointment. Comcast sends tech out at wrong time and communicates via the wrong phone number…

Yep, must be my fault!

Now they’re not sending anyone out until Sunday. They wouldn’t budge on this either even though I repeatedly reminded two different customer service people that this was comcast’s mistake and not mine. All they could say was, “Well, the service ticket says 12-4,”

I actually got so angry with one of these people (the one who promised to call back in fifteen minutes but didn’t for almost an hour) that I said, “I’m done talking to you,” and hung up on her. I’ve never done anything like that before, ever and I probably won’t again. The absolute refusal to admit a mistake and make some sort of good faith effort to correct it simply astounded and infuriated me to the point where I couldn’t have spoken anything helpful. I probably should have held my breath and counted to 10, but there it is.

I’ve heard horror stories about comast’s cycnical approach to customer service before and now I have my own.

We’ve got no cable until Sunday morning at the earliest. This did not sit well with my wife because who wants to watch the Olympics.

And Comcast is better than Verizon. I was a verizon customer at one time and their customer service makes Comcast look fabulous. So, where does one go? Nowhere, apparently.

Comcast, if you’re listening, it must be nice to be you. Provide crappy service, maintain a staff of semi-competent or incompetent tech support and customer service people, rake your customers over the coals and laugh all the way to the bank. Good for you! I’ll be sending you a carefully worded letter/email about this even though you won’t do anything about it.