Oh, Comcast; I hate thee!

So I just got off the phone with Comcast. It's a weekly thing I do, just to make sure I never get nice and stress-free.

My service has been terrible ever since I bought this place in late May. Not a week goes by without having to reset the modem. Often, the television signal disappears, and my MythTV box records a few hours of static. Other times, I lose my connection to the Internet, or specifically, to Comcast's DNS and DHCP servers.

This is actually the first time I called about the VOIP phone service. It's currently down, and keeps telling me to dial a '1' before the number I call; even when I dial 1-800-COMCAST.

Today, I spoke with a nice young lady, who was great at her job, but not very bright and certainly not tech savvy. She asked a couple of questions she already had the answers to, and managed to confuse herself with regards to what the problem actually was. She eventually opened a ticket and said it would take up to 64 for the problem to be resolved. I made a fuss about that, and then I asked about a credit.

The one thing you should always do: ask for a credit to your account. Doesn't matter what you're calling about- just ask for it. Comcast is run so poorly that it seems customer retention is a huge deal (bigger than providing service, that is). I figure they're scared to death that people will complain to the politicians or leave for Verizon, that they'll just give you some of your money back- no questions asked. So ask.

The second thing I had to complain about was more subtle. When I asked for the credit, she said that she can't credit the account now, but they can credit my account after the ticket is resolved. Notice the "can" in the second part. I asked "I'm sorry- I'm not sure I heard that- you can credit my account, or you will?". She replied, "will". I lost it. Not only am I getting crappy service, but I have to keep running after them to get it fixed! I just asked to speak with her manager. She didn't even say anything, I just went right on hold.

The manager was a nice guy. He seemed genuinely concerned about the problems. He actually looked at my service record and quickly understood what kind of customer I was. He dropped his guard a bit and vented about his customer service department not being told what the technicians know and made a couple promises about how they're trying to fix the problems in the system. He didn't even give me a chance to complain about the credit issue at length- he just said he'd give me $15. Not a figure calculated based on the actual service missed, but certainly more than I'd get normally. I was glad to take it. Then he gave me a direct phone number, name and employee ID. Now that goes a long way with me (assuming it's not fake, as they do over at Dell and HP).

So ends another tale of being screwed by the monopoly, but screwed just a little bit less.

As one of my favorite computer game characters says: "The squeaky wheel gets the KICK!"