Whoops! Forgot about posting the third
part. That should've been done a few days ago to wrap up this line
of thought. Sorry 'bout that.
So, as I said in the second part, this
final letter was sent to customer service and was Cc'd to many of the
top executives at corporate. Only history knows whether it was sent after
the exchange in Part II or right before. Regardless, it never earned
a reply from anyone at Comcast. That wasn't entirely surprising, but
it was somewhat disappointing. However, while it was mostly just me spouting
off with my fingertips, it does contain one of my favorite lines I've
ever written.
Reading this, it helps if you think
back to the last time you were extremely exasperated. Not a time
where you felt defeated, but rather a time when you refused to let it
go. I'll give you a minute.
You there yet? I'm there with you.
The situation is unacceptable and you have the irresistible urge to
lash out and point fingers. Anger and frustration is coursing
through your veins as attempt after attempt fails to solve the issue.
It's become so aggravating and incessant that it's taken on a life
of its own. It's become a mission … a mission where highlighting
the problem is more important than finding a solution and people have
to know about it!
Now with your head in the right place,
let's get to it.
**********
Always connected? Wrong. Your “high
speed” internet service could be less reliable, but then
you’d have to be doing it on purpose. Maybe you are, in fact,
doing it on purpose and you all are sitting around your desk, patting
yourselves on the back, and having a laugh at the silly consumer. I
wouldn’t be surprised. I know huge cable companies are inherently
evil, money-sucking whores, but I’m going to assume that even this
scenario might be a little too extreme. Feel free to correct me if
I’m wrong, of course.
This letter that you’re reading is
actually being written offline and on Microsoft Word. Why? Because
my email account, like every other email account, was designed to
work for those who have internet accessibility, and as these words
are being typed, at 10:25 pm, on Nov. 7th, that
accessibility exists only in some imaginative parallel universe where
night is day, up is down, right is wrong, and disconnected is
connected. I plan on copying it to an email tomorrow morning when,
magically, the internet will be fully functional again… or maybe it
won’t. See, it’s like a fun, little guessing game on when I’ll
be able to get back online… except the word “fun” belongs with
“accessibility” in that same parallel universe.
You know what? Maybe it’s me. Maybe
I’ve been misunderstanding something here. I was under the
impression that when something is said to be “always connected,”
it means that, barring scheduled maintenance, there should be
absolutely no interruptions of connectivity. Am I wrong, or do you
schedule maintenance work on my line 2-3 times a week, at all hours
of the day/night, for up to 6 hours at a time… for the last year?
Would you tolerate your cell phone
company charging you over $40 a month only for you to pick up your
phone during the middle of the day to make an important call to your
spouse and your phone tells you that there’s no signal? Maybe…
if this was an isolated incident. What if you couldn’t get a
signal for hours at a time, at seemingly random times throughout the
day/week, and this has been happening for a year? What’s the point
in paying for a service that you can’t count on?
You see, the real kicker here is that
no one seems to have any idea what the problem is. I don’t have
enough fingers to count the number of times I’ve called customer
service, and they’re about as helpful as a screen door on a
submarine. They’ll run their diagnostics test that tells them that
I have a “high packet loss,” yet none of them seem to know what
that means other than it’s the reason my service is interrupted.
Invariably, I’m advised to set up an appointment with a technician.
I’m a patient person though, so the week it takes the technician
to get here, and the five hour window during the day you all give me
to twiddle my thumbs in anticipation of his arrival, could all be
water under the bridge if the technician could pinpoint the problem
and fix it. Only, that’s just it. You see, by the time the
technician has arrived, the service interruption has long since been
magically remedied, and nothing can be done. It’s a complete waste
of time… for both of us. This happened twice, about two months
apart. Since then, I’ve scheduled, and canceled, three or so more
appointments for the same reason. I have a feeling that I’d get
much more accomplished if, instead of calling customer service again,
I just repeatedly slam my head into a wall until I suffer massive
head trauma. I mean, at least that way I’d have blood loss,
comprehension loss, and memory loss to go along with my computer’s
high packet loss.
I hope that I’ve sufficiently gotten
my point across that I am an extremely dissatisfied customer. I
hesitate to ask for an email response, because honestly, who knows
when I’ll be able to access my email account to retrieve it? My
account number is ***** ******-**-*, if you’d like to look into
this matter further. I’ll be sitting here… holding my breath.
All Too Sincerely,
MM
**********
Now, let's not go to bed angry. Everything eventually got fixed. I finally had a tech out who was able to pinpoint the problem and solve it. What was the culprit? A bad splitter at the main hookup outside the house. Yeah ... seriously. Months and months of frustration on my end and their end all due to a $5 piece of hardware. Good times.
What's that? Your attitude still isn't back to where it was before reading this post? This should do the trick (I promise it's safe).
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