Slashdot Mirror
Little Old Lady Hammers Comcast
WheezyJoe writes "The Washington Post reports that a little old lady took a hammer to Comcast.
Apparently fed up with the lousy service she received from a botched Comcast installation of "triple-play", and a completely humiliating experience at a customer service center, 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw took her claw hammer back to the customer service center and bludgeoned the office equipment into tiny plastic pieces."
If Comcast thinks an "overwhelming majority" of their 25 million customers are very satisfied with their service, they'got their heads in the sand. I'll bet you most of them have gripes enough to be dissatisfied, just not enough to switch to DirecTV or Dish Network.
For example, we've got a 30+ mile per hour windstorm going. My cable's still on. Don't know how a dish would be faring. But that doesn't mean I'm happy with Comcast.
Here in Washington, we had a program guide and DVR powered by Microsoft, a little nod from Comcast to the folks in Redmond. It wasn't in use anywhere else in the country. I found it to be very buggy and annoying. If I told the DVR to tape only new episodes of "Stargate SG-1" only on Sci-Fi, only at 8, besides putting the 8 p.m. Friday showing of new episodes in the "upcoming recordings" list, it would put in that plus every one of the 6 p.m. reruns all week long. On top of that, it loved to become unresponsive while fast forwarding. It would just fast forward along, well past the point where you wanted it to stop, buffering every key press sent by the remote, until it finally decided it was done and executed all those keypresses in quick succession.
When Comcast announced we'd be getting the program guide and DVR control software the rest of the country has, I literally jumped for joy, singing "ding dong, the witch is dead", because I thought ANYTHING had to be better than the Microsoft DVR software. I was soooo wrong. Comcast's is worse. Try to set a series recording for "Top Chef" on Bravo and you get every episode... sort of like the Microsoft DVR, but with one major difference. Microsoft put the recordings in the to do list well in advance so you could remove them. With the new Comcast DVR software, it doesn't add these things until the last minute, so the next time you look at your recorded programs list, there's a bunch of crap you didn't expect and don't want. And better than the fast forward that won't stop, the new software gives me fast forward that advances 10-20 seconds and pauses. If you hit the fast forward again, it jumps up to double-speed fast forward and you overshoot whatever mark you were trying to hit.
I contacted customer service and they just said they were sorry I didn't like it, but tough.
So my options... get a dish. Wait until Verizon rolls out FIOS TV in my neighborhood (they laid the cable this summer, but are dragging their feet on FIOS installs) and see if they're better. Shell out $800 + $12.95 a month for a dual tuner HD TiVO with Cable Card. I'm currently pinning my hopes on the second option. But when Verizon gets off their asses Comcast loses my $1800 a year for cable TV and cable internet.
The only reason Comcast can delude themselves that their customers are happy is because they've been spending millions to lobby the FCC to restrict Verizon's roll-out of TV via fiber and prevent their customers from having a second terrestrial alternative. As TV over fiber rolls out, if the telecoms don't cock it up (and that's a BIG if), you could see people leaving Comcast in *droves*.
Hooray for Mona Shaw. She took civil disobedience a little too far, but God bless her. We're all having a vicarious thrill from her exploit.
Start a happiness pandemic
I serve on student government at small liberal arts college. My position was recently added, and basically, I handle the concerns of students relating to information technology. For example, I've been working with the administration first by advocating for a wireless campus, then helping decide which areas would receive service.
But the first thing I did on student government was try and tackle the "Comcast problem". The "problem" in question being massive downtime... over 120 calls due to downtime in one month. Keep in mind, this is a SMALL campus. The residence halls only had maybe a thousand students maximum. (And that is a liberal estimate).
Now when my internet went down, I actually followed the Comcast tech into floor's wiring closet, and saw a bank of cable modems hooked up to a switch. He located my room's modem, and power cycled it. Problem solved. And it was something that a user should be able to due themselves, but Comcast insisted that the students not have access to the modems, because we might steal them.
The thing is, the wait for a technician was two to three business days, if the technician even showed up.
Slowly I garnered support for a new provider, starting with Residence Life, and eventually the head of IT for the college arranged a meeting with all the Comcast bigwigs... the main guy was in charge of sales for the entire state I believe. Anyways, the Comcast posse promptly blew off everything the college had to say. When I brought up students having technicians pull a no show, I was told that my peers were exaggerating or lying. It took me stating that I had experienced a no show before they would even concede the point. Everything was like that... they wanted the college to PROVE they were incompetent. They ignored what me and the head of IT said (That modem's should be moved to resident rooms, and that anyone whose modem was missing at year's end would be charged for it) and insisted that the problem was due to illegal file sharing. When they were told that connections were already throttled to a point where that was not an issue, they insisted the college's wiring was faulty and brownouts were causing the problem. Comcast offered to install UPSs in all wiring closets. (And got a little miffed when I said they should have already had them).
Then they insisted it was a firmware issue with the modems and replaced every modem in the halls. Finally they admitted they needed to move modems into the rooms so users could power cycle on their own, and that was only after the college administration threatened to end the contract early and find a new ISP, and I threatened to write to Consumerist.
End result? What could have been a fifteen minute "whoops, our bad, thanks for the suggestion" type meeting, it became a five month process, where every user complaint was dismissed unless not only a specific user would testify to it in writing, but any bad experiences with rude techs, or techs who never showed up were not owned up to unless the user had the foresight to have a witness wait for the tech with them. Even when the college pointed to the acceptable downtime limit in the contract, Comcast refused to turn over logs and insisted that the college either sue or accumulate documentation.
And during the process, every word I said was met with derision or waved away since I was "only a student". It was made clear to me by Comcast that my opinion did not matter. And quit frankly, I think only the threat the college finding a new provider or possible lawsuits for breach of contract prompted them to act.