No customer service

This was the second incident this week that ended up costing me hours of my life. On Tuesday my internet kept going out while I was telecommuting to work; it took over three hours to get hold of someone. That's because I happened to see an email sent to me after i gave up trying to get someone on the line. The email informed me that my monthly bill would be increasing by $75 permanently. Apparently that's not true, but that's what multiple comcast employees told me when I inquired. In the end I had to work till 12:30 at night to PARTIALLY catch up with the work left undone due to comcast's service and assistance problems. I was offered a whopping $20 as compensation for three hours of anger, frustration, and incompetence.

Add to that the humiliation and neglect last night.......i was left stranded, unable to work (i'd wanted to log in late to catch up on stuff), and not knowing what the problem was, how severe it was, or if i'd have internet service in the morning (if I didn't, i'd have had to commute into Boston to work at my office). I finally gave up and started sending increasingly snide and nasty emails to a rep who sarcastically shrugged off my previous complaints as oopsies. This morning he called me back to accuse me of harassment. He offered only a very brief, very vague apology for the hours and hours of frustration and lost work, then told me that he would ONLY discuss MY behavior and how rude *I* was. No financial compensation. No other apologies. He threatened to cancel my service (what service? - I'm still having service hiccups, and this is with NEW EQUIPMENT) and threatened to call law enforcement on me if i raised my voice. When I asked him if it was intelligent business practice to give misleading and damaging information to customers - which could cause the company to lose said customers - he hemmed & hawed and said they'd look into that. Then it was back to disgusting a person I was because i asked him to consider what kind of person would willingly work for a company that deliberately harasses, stiffs, and ignores its PAYING CUSTOMERS.

Again, no other apologies. Just a self-pitying whine that I'D been rude to sweet lil' ol' Comcast. No apologies for the dead-end transfers, the wrong callbacks, the constant misgendering by the agents, the snickering when I complained to one agent ("you can't prove that happened"). Just i was a meanie, and Comcast was an innocent victim. Like I'd randomly decided "You know what? I wanna spend my evening yelling at random strangers on the phone." I have cancer. I had to go to the oncologist yesterday to see the results of a test (it was okay). I spent the entire day struggling to work (which I'm very far behind on) while dealing with stress and lack of sleep and all I wanted to do was go home, relax, and take a quick nap, before getting up and working a midnight shift - partially to make up for Comcast's pathetic substandard "service" on Tuesday. And instead I was left with a migraine, hoarse from yelling ("Oh mrs matthew, i cannot hear you, please repeat your issue again" - for the fifth time), frustrated, in tears, and feeling like I'd been slapped in the face and kneed in the groin at the same time, repeatedly, for 4+ hours.

The gaslighting - to pretend that my anger came out of the blue, premeditated, instead of being the culmination of over seven hours of degrading negligence spread over two days, accompanied by a host of deliberate lies and financial threats - is even more insulting. The guy who whined to me earlier that i was being "rude" and disgusting - does he consider getting spammed by comcast text messaging (over 50 automated texts in less than 15 minutes) harassment? How about the day when I got 30 text messages, one every 5-10 minutes or so, constantly bothering me while i was trying to sleep? Is that harassment? Oh, wait, we're not gonna talk about that. We're just gonna talk about how rude *I* am. How nice. I suck as a customer, but I can't even remotely, vaguely hint that comcast stinks as a corporation.

Don't worry, though. In case the "customer service" rep is upset, i've deleted all contact info from my devices. There's no way for me to contact him now, so he won't have to listen to me bad-mouth his precious employer.

Thank you for the encouragement.

The main issue Thursday night was resolved. It took TWO HOURS to get even a vague report as to what the trouble was: there was NOTHING official at your site, no announcements when you called in, until around 9:30 EST. I was not able to get a hold of anyone till around 11:30. I needed to know whether or not I would have to get up early and go to my office, which would have affected my ability to work extra hours (again, this is partially necessitated due to comcast's incompetence and shoddy service). This, coupled with absolute silence on your end, made me extremely anxious and angry. It wasn't just "Oh, I can't watch a quick video before I take a nap, oh well"' it was, "What time will I have to get up tomorrow, and how much can i get done before I have to go home? The less I can work tomorrow the more I'll have to work next week PLUS I'll have cancel plans for the weekend, possibly the next 2-3 weekends." You see how frustrating this can get? How quickly one seemingly minor problem can snowball into something much, much worse? And how that could negatively impact someone who has been going through an enormous amount of stress?

I've been working a shocking amount of overtime at my job over the last year despite being told by my doctors to take it easy after I had surgery. I'm working 50-60 hour weeks, sometimes 18 hour days, some weekends. I'm exhausted. I didn't have a three-day holiday weekend last week; I had to spend a good chunk of Sunday mucking my way through an ice storm to have an emergency scan. And then I had to do basically seven days' worth of work in four, but with one hand tied behind my back because my internet provider can't maintain a simple level of operation for more than 3 minutes without turning into a Peter Sellers movie.

Here is the overall issue: Comcast has zero accountability. None. Something goes wrong, there's radio silence. I spent, collectively, SEVEN HOURS over two days trying to get clarification on issues which deeply affected my ability to live my life, both in the short term (the service outage Thursday night, which completely torpedoed my entire cable service, not just the streaming options) and long term (Tuesday with the billing confusion). You offer multiple methods to contact assistance, and each and every one of them is a dead end. Deliberately so. We're left stranded to figure out the issue on our own. There are no follow-ups. Nobody will talk to us. Need help? "Ask the community." Welcome to late-stage capitalism. "Do it yourself. Oh, and give me your money."

I'm tired of boilerplate "we understand how frustrating this is," not to mention this garbage "I'm a customer too." No, you're not. The rep I spoke to yesterday morning was self-pitying and whiny, refusing to acknowledge any responsibility whatsoever. He feels like I just came at him out of the blue? He should feel free to call his co-workers down the hall and say, "Hey, Phil, seriously, what the hell is going on? I'm getting irate emails and phonecalls from customers fuming over a total lack of communication regarding services. This isn't my domain and you need to get your team and your call center reps to step up." But no. Absolutely ZERO accountability or sympathy. Instead, he feels I just randomly decided to pick his name out of a directory and send him mean emails, like he and his employer have nothing to do with my anger.

Back in 2019, I missed a payment due to a tragedy I was dealing with. The payment was made but Comcast "accidentally" forgot to credit it. The aftermath was a total clusterf**k. When my services were finally restored, it turned out that your company had "accidentally" sent a signal to my DVR box, frying it. Everything on it was gone, including one irretrievable item in which a beloved family member got interviewed on TV. The box was just a slab of plastic taking up space on my TV table. When the agent came by to replace it, he spent two hours whining about my landlord's dog (locked on another floor, no danger to him whatsoever) and threatening to sue me if he got bitten. The following week my cable went out and I spent hours trying to get answers. The agent I spoke to kept misgendering me then threatened to call the cops on me because, according to him, I'd stolen my modem & DVR (he said there was no record of the appointment, even after I gave him proof). He impersonated his own manager and was just overall a total creep and whackjob. And guess what? The outage was due to an accident the next city over. A simple sentence could have ended the entire issue. He knew full well what the cause of the problem was. He just chose instead to prolong the situation, harass me, and threaten me with arrest.

These are your co-workers. This is the company you work for.

And by the way, when I demanded to speak to a manager about that incident, I got a call a week later, at 6:30 in the morning, from an enraged cow who roared obscenities at me for 10 minutes, not allowing me to get a word in edgewise, before hanging up on me. Telling me how "rude" I was, how I "didn't deserve" Comcast (yeah, she got that right) and telling me to go to Hell. (Lady, I'm stuck with Comcast, i'm already IN Hell.)

I'm tired of having to stress over my life schedule, my commute, my weekends, and everything else because your company can't provide 30-year-old technology. Because you're unreliable and arrogant. Because your company hides behind increasingly labyrinthine methods of communication. Because your company either ignores us altogether, or deliberately and passive-aggressively overcompensates by saturating and spamming its clientele with innumerable text messages, callbacks that leave us on hold before disconnecting, or randomly resetting our equipment days after the fact ("Oh Mr Matthew, you said you wanted a system reboot" - yes, EIGHT DAYS AGO YOU INSUFFERABLE MORON).

Meanwhile, the sociopathic dweeb running the company - currently under federal investigation for various financial infractions (and also clearly the basis for Larry David's Kevin Roberts character on SNL, not a compliment) siphons tens of millions of dollars every year for himself. God knows he'll probably be head of the FCC once he has enough money to bribe our new yarpie president, elmo, for the post.

So, all due respect, spare me the "this isn't the experience we want our customers to have." Yes, it is. If it wasn't, comcast could easily spend a tiny fraction of the $38,000,000,000 profit it made last year to (1) give us a year's grace from rate increases, (2) hire more reps to answer our questions, and (3) hire a handful of techs to come up with a far more efficient, user-friendly, and accessible communication system which doesn't strand us in digital limbo. Instead we're given pre-written speeches about how "we look forward to providing you with the best service." Don't tell me. SHOW ME. DO IT.

Good day.

@mro121 Thank you for taking the time to share your experience in such a detailed manner. We take our customers feedback very serious and will definitely forward this to our leadership team. Please contact us if you have any additional questions or concerns at any time, we're available 7 days a week. In the meantime, stay safe and enjoy the rest of your day!

"We take our customers feedback very serious." Uh huh. Suuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrre ya do.

I look forward to the next wildly ridiculous service outage, which will likely be just before I have to log online Monday morning for work. And I look forward to my estimated wait time, which will be - be-tween - four - tee - and (different pre-recorded voice) eight - tee - (original pre-recorded voice) min-utes.

(Cue loop of canned soft jazz occasionally punctuated by distorted package offers and periodic announcements that i'm now number 387 in line to speak with an agent.)

Comcast customer assistance: Hell as designed by Sartre, Kafka, & a Einsatzgruppe technocrat.