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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
Have you considered the washington post as your next victim? I think we'd all appreciate someone sending them a clear message about flagrantly unnecessary pagination.
ôó
Damn.
I can't figure out whether I want to go out and smash office equipment with a hammer, or I want this woman to come in and smash my office equipment with a hammer.
Which end of this fight is the right end? I CAN'T DECIDE!!
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Please let this woman have a made-for-TV movie made of her life.
Internet + SD cable. No box. I think I get great speed because I'm in the city. Never had an issue.
I can barely read TFA with all the pop ups and flash pop-overs. Sheesh!
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.
Funny story, Tom Delay got his nickname the same way.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
is there no problem you can't solve?
If only I could get away with taking a hammer to equipment in a corporate office building. But something tells me if I had done exactly the same thing she had, I still would have gone to jail (she got 3 months suspended sentence).
Still, I'm glad she did it. Comcast deserved every minute of it, I'm sure. I never thought it was possible that I would run into the welcoming arms of a telco until the day I got Comcast.
She's rather old, so I guess the office equipment was easier for her to catch than the employees.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
HAMMERTIME!
(now discussion can continue as normal.)
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
'easyhack'
or
'!hardhack'
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
it might work. Even the Iraqi army would be pretty reticent about shooting down an army of grandmas wielding hammers.
ôó
Talk until you're out of breath and they still ignore you, maybe its time to switch to a hammer.
... when it was good :) When service matters, when companies gave a dam... when people gave a dam doing their jobs...
I say we arm our elderly and let them take back this country. They stood up in ww2, and they might be feeling up to it again.
Comcast's miserable but completely irresitable
Bringing TV to the home
Late nights all alone with the boob tube
Ohh-oh-oh-oh...
Mona shaw is getting really raw
and calls them on the phone
"can you fix my cable you
I-dee-ots?"
But she's getting nowhere
so she takes her hammer there...
Bang, bang, Mona's old claw hammer
Came down upon their stuff
Bang, bang, Mona's old claw hammer
Made their office look real rough
Let's here it for Consumers Rights!
>
Likely the same storm we had in the Willamette Valley. two Dish network dishes and 90cm for "other" came thru OK. I expected no less. The trick is to not mount them on top of the house. Dishes do not need to be high like a TV antennae. They need only a clear view of a portion of the sky
Why is Comcast still the only option for my friends who live in Arlington County? Why is Cox my only option in Fairfax County? I have endless complaints about Cox and my friends in Arlington have their's about Comcast. Wouldn't some competition between the two be likely to press these megacorps to resolve a few of the issues?
I was just at the /. party in MN, at Vibrant.
We took a hammer to many pieces of hardware.
It was a good feeling to hit that old E-250.
I'd love to take it to Comcast.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I always wondered why my local Comcast office was behind plexiglass (bullet-proof?). The Post Office down the street has no such physical barriers. I guess Comcast is used to dealing with this sort of response to their customer dis-service. The Post Office is slow and all, but at least you get what they promise. I just wish Comcast could get their programming guide data fixed. I lost a few channels that they block now with their filter. I can still most of one, and a hazy version of another. Comcast's solution? Upgrade my package to digital and pay $40 more a month for the two channels I want. No thanks. OTA looks better and better if there was just another high-speed internet player in the market.
Comcast high-speed internet (without CableTV): $61
Comcast mini-basic CableTV ($15) + high-speed internet: $60
What a racket, eh? It's cheaper to get their mini-basic CableTV and internet than to just get internet solo. Not by much, of course. I wish I could just get high-speed internet for $45 and then that'd be motivation enough to get a nice OTA setup going.
It's Crapcastic!!!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
I'd contribute to paying her fine for her.
I should introduce her to my grandmother. More grandma's should be wielding claw hammers. Bingo would be so much more interesting...
The best part about the article is the end, when the police fine her $345 (likely less than the cost of the equipment she smashed) and gave her the hammer back. Is there a lighter slap-on-the-wrist punishment? The police must be Comcast subscribers too.
Actually Comcast has been great in this area. But then again that's because they're being compared against the Verizon.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
parking them outside on a bench for hours then telling them that the manager they were waiting for had sneaked out the back door was pretty provocative on Comcast's part, if I were the judge I'd have been itching to get that bitch on a contempt charge.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This story is over a week old.. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/75YearOld-Woman-Takes-Hammer-to-Comcast-Office-88272
Sorry Roger, you tiger now.
When you could spell damn out in full without worrying about the blasphemy police....
How many times must people be told? Don't mess with the elderly! I mean, these people actually go out and vote. You just watch, one day there will be a curfew and all those under 70 will be in-home, lights-out at 5:30 sharp.
Time for a Paypal fund to pay the fine?
Having lived through 3 different cable providers giving me the same service. Started with TCI, then moved to ATT, then moved to Comcast. I'd have to say I'm the least satisfied with Comcast out of all three. I hate thier customer service. Thier CRM setup is a complete joke. Personally, I think the woman is a hero, If she had a paypal posted I'd send a buck for making my day. Comcast should have this happen in every one of thier offices every single day until they get the point. Treat thier customers right.
Well, let's get real. This lady was mistreated and ignored. Faced with this kind of obstruction and utterly dismissive disrespect, some kind of escalation is not only understandable, but probably inevitable.
Or else you just give up and do nothing. Because Comcast, or whoever it is, doesn't have to pay attention to you.
If you're going to be sanctimonious, save it for someone who does real harm for no good reason, and not a little old lady, with an impeccable standing in her community BTW, who did nothing more than damage some completely obsolete office equipment to make a point about being, well, unconscionably rude.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Time of this event hitting the Washington Post: today!
I have called comcast 'crapcast' for about 2 years, and I was a loyal customer of comcast from 2000 to 2005.
Comcast has too many failings, and several people in my neighborhood switched to u-verse http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=5838
I was and am sick of Comcast, and I never intend to go back to them. They were the only game in town in 2000, and now they are not. Now they look like a dinosaur by comparison. I think it is Very sad when nearly all choices look better than comcasts offerings. Hell they lost to the the typical last place finisher, AT&T!
Its copyrighted and I fear lawyers from the RIAA
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
Brave Mrs. Shaw and her hammer of justice could be the poster-lady for a new movement of assertive consumers.
Proceeds go to her legal fees, and whatever else her kind heart desires. Shux! I'd buy two (XL, please) and wear 'em with pride!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Its the little old lady from Pasadena...
Only a 75 year old white lady can get away with something like that. If it was a 15 to 25 year old black male, then he would already be in Gitmo...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
In the spirit of Star Trek diplomacy, "Words don't always solve problems. Sometimes you just have to punch an alien, er, customer service representative in the face."
I don't know. Imagine one of those old timers holding up an M-60 like Rambo and wildly spinning around while firing the thing.
What?
Stop watching T.V. I haven't owned a television in almost a decade. Feels great.
Given that Comcrap managed to brick a 3Com OfficeConnect modem I owned when they attempted to flash it remotely w/their firmware and then told me I had to buy a new modem, I'd say a hammer was a nice start. This was after 2 years of having to tell the phone "support" how to do their jobs every time we lost our ip address when the renew got screwed up. If it weren't for the support crew that was in Canada, I'd have dropped them *much* sooner.
Yes, I bought a new modem...It was one for DSL.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
I have some customers who use ComCast now that they own Houston's RoadRunner customers. (That is not really a typo...) I had occasion to call ComCast the other day asking for technical assistance for a customer replacing their Linksys Wireless cable gateway. Comcast told me they would have to fill out a form with the new MAC address and the account would be updated in 5-7 days. After an hour of being transferred around I finally found someone who updated the account MAC address in 5 minutes. Then I asked for the DNS address of the nameservers. They told me they didn't support DNS. I got transferred to four people who didn't have a CLUE about Windows XP needing a nameserver address (if you have a static IP, even if it's an internal NAT address) before I finally simply hung up, set the workstation to DHCP and derived a DNS address from ipconfig.
There is such an abundance of crappy customer service out there you would think that any company that provides outstanding (or even reasonable) customer service could steal the market.
My biggest advice for companies wanting to reduce the cost of customer service is, "Clean it up upstream." Don't put out crappy products and you will have fewer customer service problems. This means solid design and VERY good documentation, plus some solid troubleshooting tips. Then pay your customer support techs better money, give them a nice place to work, and reward them for SOLVING PROBLEMS instead of just closing tickets or answering calls. (This means the customer support function needs to be "designed" instead of just being an afterthought.) Provide constant and high-quality training and alternative ways for the customer to get support, and for God's sake, ANSWER THE PHONE!
I ask my customers, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate our service?" Then I ask, "What would it take to make it a 10?" I have managed to retain some really loyal customers this way, and I have dropped services I can't provide good service for. Noone can please everyone, so I have also dropped customers who are impossible to please. Cleaning it up upstream for me (an integrator) means clarifying the scope of work and the customer expectations before I start the job. I also evaluate the customer's reasons for wanting my services. Many times they are trying to solve a problem by "jumping to solutions", and I have saved customers a lot of money and grief by helping them troubleshoot the whole problem before committing to help. It takes more time, but it prevents hassles downstream.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I used to work in IT for a cable company, and whenever a customer went bizerk in the customer service office, a white clicking light would flash in most offices and pre-designated "bouncers", mostly employee volunteers, would walk briskly down the hall toward the service area. The theory was that large quantities of large people would make customers think twice about violence.
Table-ized A.I.
my local comcast office is hidden behind a giant strip mall... and surrounded by a barbed wire fence... seems pretty ridiculous for a company with 25 million satisfied customers...
now is the winter of our discotheque
I take my vengeance on Comcast by taking the Triple Play junk mail out of my mailbox, writing "Refused - Return to Sender" in sharpie and dropping it back in the nearby drop box. At a peak I was doing this about 3 times a week. It seems to have slowed recently. - A somewhat more satisfied with FIOS Tv and Net over Comcast user.
Good idea. Just, for the love of god, stay off their lawn.
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.
Help the muthafuckin' aged!!!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
BAD MOD, No cookie! Referencing the parent and making a JOKE about the current state of affairs? Cut the guy some slack.
Maybe English isn't the mod's first language, but even if you don't get the joke, it's hardly off-topic.
Somebody woke up on the grumpy side of bed I guess.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Would that be the same Iraqi army that wound up killing Iranian children sent out to be "martyrs"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I've worked the front lines of customer service and the repetition can become maddening, which is usually why you get a droll response, because you are the nth person to have said problem or service need.
I suspect this was the most exciting/entertaining thing to happen at the office in a long while. I'd bet there was laughter and this probably egged her on...
Speculating futher the scene was probably made more hilarious, given her age: The speed of the impromtu demolition was probably in slow motion and labored. I'd bet at times it may have looked like the equipment was locked in battle with her and that she was on the losing end of the fight! (laugh)
Sure they had to call the police, but I'd bet there was a sigh of disappointment (back to work) when they arrived and subdued her...which makes me wonder...where was the Taser Secret Service? They should have been all over this.
JOLTED1
It's important to know that I forgot what I thought I knew when I thought I knew it all:Now I don't even know whatIknow.
It must be a cathartic feeling smashing the equipment of your nemesis.
threadeds blog
Mona "the Hammer" Shaw vs Steve "the Chair" Ballmer.
Just imagine!
This lady reminds me of Carrie Nation, One of the champions of prohibition. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation "Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910, she was arrested some 30 times for "hatchetations," as she came to call them. Nation paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets." She was 65 at the time.
...or is scaring the heck out of the office staff not really the best way to deal with her problems with the technicians and managers of the company? If this counts as "heroic", I can only assume a villain would have taken out a local school as well.
I like this quote from the Washington Post article: Her take on Comcast: "What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."
Another quote: "Manassas police spokesman Sgt. Tim Neumann says there have been other police calls to that Comcast office..." I would love to know why.
Quote from the parent comment: "I called Comcast and started screaming. This got me somewhere as I finally got escalated to the CEO's office where they had a customer care executive assigned to me."
You never get to the CEO's office, I'm guessing. They just say that to try to make you think they believe your complaint is important. In 2005, the Comcast CEO made $14.3 million, just for that one year. I know, I know what you are thinking: "I'm sad. He had a bad year!" But, don't worry, in 2006 he made $27.8 million.
I think that it is safe to assume that someone who makes millions each year for doing a bad job has no concerns whatsoever about any troubles you have with his company. Any phony expression of concern is handled by people who barely make a living.
In case you want to express your horror that he only makes tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions each year, contact the Comcast CEO directly: Brian Roberts.
Why is being rich considered by rich people a license to be evil?
Nowdays they have a worthy replacement. As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to buy Vodafone 3G Broadband can testify NTL can in some cases seem competent by comparison.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
There is not a single American black male imprisoned in Gitmo. Never has been, either, never will be until somebody gets the bright idea to join the jihad and go off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban then get caught by the troops over there. They would then be taken out of Gitmo after their US citizenship is discovered. (It has happened before -- they had a one fairly well-off white kid, John Walker Lindh who styled himself "Sulayman al-Faris", from California who got bored, converted to Islam, and went off to meet Osama bin Laden. He plead guilty of providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to twenty years. There was also an American/Saudi dual citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was transfered to a US prison from where he mounted a Supreme Court appeal to not be held as an enemy combatant. He was let out in a deal with Saudi Arabia -- essentially, "He gives up his citizenship and you keep him away from any place where he can shoot at Americans, and we'll let him go".)
You may now return to your regularly scheduled Republican bashing. Did you hear the one where they threw a four-year old girl in Gitmo because her mom was gay? True story, I read it on Slashdot.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
... to Earth mamma Thor...
....will Comcast blend?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Go ol gal.......more of us who are stuck with every service in the world that we PAY for and get junk in return should stop being so nice to the "customer service" as they condescend to our requests for service. We are definitely getting "serviced" but not in a way that should be described in print!!
Waiting for wisdom from the other computer world...
Dear Hammer, I sincerely like to thank you Cuz now I got the world swingin from my nuts And damn it feels good to be a gangsta
"Being a responsible newspaper, we must note that this is a misdemeanor, a crime, a completely inappropriate way of handling a business dispute. Noted. "
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Not only in US, but the whole world's large commercial organizations (you can name a few easily) treat their customers like pigs/dogs/slaves, because they neither have franchise or monopoly. For a good citizen like us have no way to against them but just tolerate.
She did a very good lesson to express our anger and show the hypocrisy of today's commercial organizations.
Hong Kong - International Joke Center (after 1997-06-30)
As a Dutchman, being given a dam by a company seemed quite appealing to me....
I've got Verizon DSL/Phone with no CATV, and Comcast STILL managed to screw me badly!
A couple weeks ago, in the middle of the afternoon, my internet connection started crapping all sorts of madness. Disconnecting constantly, poor throughput... I thought maybe the line was really noisy or something, so I pick up the phone... No dial tone.
It took a couple hours to piece together some of the information in my head. Hearing someone say something about cable while standing outside a new tenant's apartment across the hall, and later going to the top of the stairs and coming back down. (The box where all our phonelines come in is on the third floor, at the top of the stairs)
With this information, I go up and check the box... It's closed. I take the screw out and open it, the clasp that holds everything down in one of the blocks pops open on its own... Closer inspection reveals a broken retaining tab. (Later found on the floor.) One cordless phone handset, and a little wiggling of wirey bits later, I am able to determine that this unmarked and now quite fscked connection is my line. So I taped the clasp down with some gaffer's tape, taped a little ball of tape to the back so the door puts pressure on it, marked the thing correctly, and wandered back to my apartment grumbling about how it shouldn't be illegal to light stupid people on fire.
After talking to the new tenant, he confirmed that the Comcast technician said he had to make sure there was a phone line (wtf?!), and did in fact go play about in the box.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
First of all, let's qualify "evil". A lot of people (probably not you, but just to get it cleared anyway) have this "Black and White" idea that "evil" means being on a self-destructive quest to cause as much pain as possible, fuelled by pure hatred towards your fellow man. Unfortunately those don't really get ahead in the real world.
RL "evil", especially of the corporate kind, is really just Sociopathy, a.k.a., Antisocial Personality Disorder. And indeed there seem to be a lot of them in management, and especially CEO positions.
These are people who, simply put, don't give a flying fuck about their fellow man. You're an NPC to them. They don't hate you, they just don't care. They might harm you if it provides some momentary entertainment, and they think they can get away with it, but just as well they might pretend to be your friend if it helps them get an advantage that way.
They also tend to be people who can (A) read others perfectly, and (B) fake any feeling convincingly. They can look hurt when they need to look hurt, shed a tear when that gets the emotional message across, or sell you logging rights in Sahara with the most sincere look on their face. They could tell you to do something that will ruin your life with a perfectly straight face, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. Why not? You're just an NPC to them. You don't matter.
Just as an example of lying with a straight face, a lot love to reinvent their past as something that milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
And my take is that it isn't money that turns people into sociopaths, but the other way around: in the race up the corporate ladder, these guys have a natural advantage. And in the race between corporations, the one without principles or scruples will have the lower costs and get ahead.
If being rich changed someone that way, then he probably was thinking that way long before. All that's changed now is that he feels powerful enough to drop (a part of) the mask and act like the asshole he always wanted to be.
In a sense, we even expect them to. The idea that a corporation should have no other goals or responsibilities than making more money, at all cost, is, well, just saying that said corporation should act like a sociopath. Unfortunately, a corporation is nothing more than a bunch of people, and its decisions _are_ taken by people. So if we expect corporations to act that way, and put our money on those which act that way, we're pretty much asking them to be led by sociopaths. Or if they aren't, we'll sell their shares and move our money to the ones who can act properly antisocial.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
its really kind of funny that so many folks act like television is a need. I got rabbit ears on my set. Sure there is a DVD player and a VCR but ridiculous amounts of money for more bad content slammed full of advertising? No,it is plain stupid. I do understand the need for a phone and internet connectivity, but there are choices for those. I read one post that indicated a 1800 dollar a year cable bill. How much content in the form of DVD's would that purchase? Paying for television is like paying for air. So maybe you deserve to be treated like an idiot for buying it. Microsoft does the same thing. So does the government for that matter. The only way to get satisfaction is to not participate otherwise you are their Bi**h.
You know what they say: Violence is not the answer, it's the question. The answer is YES.
Operator hammers and sickles little old ladies!
"Maxwell's Silver Hammer." The Beatles, Abbey Road.
hammer granny: So, you ready to fix things?
executive: you're crazy!
hammer granny: *whack!* Let's try this again. Fix things?
executive: Stop it! Stop it!
hammer granny: *whack!* You know what I want to hear. I can keep this up until your IQ matches your shoe size. Maybe I don't even want to stop. *whack!* Ooh, that sounded like you lost a couple of years of college there, maybe some fine motor control. Stop, hammer time. *whack!*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
No, but a lot of time it does seem that you need to be evil to be rich.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Keep in mind that back then people rented their phones from At&t, paid twenty cents a minute to call across the country, most domestic cars fell apart even faster, air travel was really really expensive.
...where Helen Hunt has a very short, and not even very insightfull, rant against health insurance companies, and audiences started cheering and clapping? I heard a story about a health care executive who went to see the movie and witnessed the crowd cheering - only THEN did he realize there was widespread dissatisfaction with the way his company operated.
If Comcast executives aren't having that same "Oh, Shit!" moment now, it's time to sell stock.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Comcast high-speed internet (without CableTV): $61
Comcast mini-basic CableTV ($15) + high-speed internet: $60
Until a few months ago, I was getting Comcast minimum TV + internet for a bit under $60 (Washington DC area).
I called them up and told them I was considering switching to FIOS, which had just come through my neighborhood.
They instantly reduced my internet charges to $30 (total bill now $45).
Competition can be a wonderful thing - use it!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Time Warner Cable seems much better then Comcast. In terms of performance (10MB Internet standard) They at least come the day they are called Unfortunately it is we will be there between 12:00 - 4:00 and they will be there at 5:00 making you loose a half day of work for nothing. They don't charge directly for the equipment. It is mostly pain free service. Don't get me wrong there are things I dislike about it, I would much rather choose the channels I want then get a huge Club 900 channels where my family only watches about 10 of them, but with all the other competitors do the same thing. But compared to the rest Time Warner seems better. If you are unhappy with Comcast I would put a petition in with your local government saying we want comcast out. Just complaining and breaking Comcast keyboards and phones with a hammer wont do much. But if the community goes You suck we Want an other company then they will get it. Stop complaining and start acting.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And you are still with them why? Drop their @(#$* like its an ebola death monkey (at least those are cute). They provide bad service, poor support, and your constituency still probably aren't happy. I can't belive you cant get a cheaper service all in one. Throw some traffic shaping on it so your P2P wankers don't flood everyone else and you should be good to go. I bet you'll save the college money.
$30 monthly comcast fee * 1000 oppressed students = $30,000 a month for service. Start talking to real ISPs in the area.
I might as well...
I was a business class customer of a local cable company that comcast bought out. Back then, I was pretty much forced to pay extra for that service because they blocked all inbound smtp and http (which I provided on my servers). But, the commercial service was actually nice, and when I had a problem, they were very responsive and I had a direct line to L2 techs who knew what they were doing.
Comcast then bought the company. I only found out when my bill arrived and it was now from comcast. They never told me I needed to change anything, and my service was still working and the bill amount was the same, so I didn't really care.
One weekend, I lost connectivity. My own end seemed fine, as I was seeing the typical stream of ARP requests flying by on comcast's network. It looked to me like my default gateway was down. I called and explained the symptoms.
The tech was confused and thought I should own a comcast router (I didn't...I run my own firewall with a regular linksys cablemodem). This would be a matter of contention for the next 2 months.
Anyway, the problem persisted intermittently. To their credit, I did finally get through to a support rep who actually discovered the real problem: My modem was being intermittently filtered for some reason. He did explain that comcast was moving to using their own routers for all business class customers (same service, they just give you a static IP address in a 'good' netblock). I continued to use my old ISP config, and it worked, so I didn't care.
Problem came back, but this time I knew the likely cause. This time the support lady was a total asshole demanding that I owned some form of comcast equipment, and that they would need to send a technician out (after explaining to her several times what was really going on) to remove that equipment and install their new solution. At this point, I was sick of paying extra for service I was not receiving so began the process of going back to residential service.
Long story short, I had to sign some form to give comcast permission to cut my commercial service and go back to residential. They mailed this form to me in such a way that my server dropped it (their server was on the spamhaus block/exploit list!). I finally got the form and filled it out.
2 days later, service is dead again. #$!@$#@!$. Again, they claim that I own some sort of comcast gear (b/c I was a commercial customer, and they have a certain way to do that...but I was transplanted from an ISP that they bought out...this is like the 20th time I've explained this to them). They will schedule a time to send a technician out. I agree, for now, and then call back to cancel the nonsense (hoping to speak to somebody with more clue)
When I complain about this, I finally get the rep to concede that they don't need to send anybody out, and that they will transfer me to residential class service. They *FINALLY* understand that I don't have any of their equipment. I continue to use my old static IP address, which still works (go figure), because they have not given me any connection information yet to change (this is for a change that they were definitely going to force on me...and I have yet to hear any official news of this, other than when I call to report problems with my service).
I did eventually get changed to residential service. Biggest hassle is that I have to smart relay through comcast's SMTP servers. Luckily they don't block inbound ports, so I can get away with paying less.
Here's the fun part. Last week there was a router from comcast sitting on my porch. Inside was a letter about them changing my commercial service (which I no longer have due to the frustrations with my connection and horrible customer service). This thing showed up about a month after I started having problems, and AFTER I changed to residential service! These people obviously have a serious lack of internal communication that rivals even that with their customers!
If they ha
She had to use a hammer because her fists alone couldn't get through their thick skulls.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Dude, let's just look at what Fiduciary really means, before going down that line of reasoning.
In a nutshell it just means that they'll do a honest job and not defraud the investors to enrich themselves. That's it. They have the respeonsibility to do a honest job... the same as everyone else.
Every single employee in the company is held to the same expectation. (If less sometimes less formalized.) The lowly janitor too isn't supposed to let himself be bribed to install a few keyloggers and sell the company's secrets to the competition. The database admin too isn't supposed to export the production database and sell it to the competition. The accountant isn't supposed to invent new taxes payable to his own account, either. Etc. They're all, simply put, expected to do a honest job.
Shouldn't they be paid millions per year too, then?
Do you genuinely think that paying them tens of millions a year is the only way to keep upper management honest?
1. That's such a bad opinion of them, that it stands out even on Slashdot. But more importantly,
2. Repeatedly it didn't really work. Enron and WorldCom sure weren't kept honest by high management salaries, for example. Or I can remember at least one case where one guy gutted a company just for the hell of it, and actually cooked the books to make it look like his cost-saving measures were doing anything positive at all.
3. Even more importantly, you can look at continental Europe or Japan, places with much more reasonable GINI indexes. Meaning that the difference between a director's wage and the janitor's wage is a helluva lot less than in the USA. If what you say was true, then both should see some massive corruption and have their economies ran into the ground as everyone who gets to the top starts defrauding the company to fill his own pockets. And somehow, while such cases occasionally do exist, they tend to be rather isolated, few and far in between.
Contrary to somewhat popular misconception, there isn't some income limit at which people suddenly become honest because they already have all the money they might ever need. The guy with 2 million a year, wants 3 million a year. The guy with 20 million a year, wants 30. If you paid someone 2 billion a year, the only effect would be that he'd want 3 billion, so he can buy an aircraft carrier as his personal yacht.
You can see that for as long as we have a recorded history. Whoever was an earl wanted to be a duke, whoever was a duke wanted to be a king, and whoever was a king wanted to be an emperor. It's just human nature, and it's how the human brain is wired.
The brain sees differentials, not absolute happiness values, so there simply is no point where you'll say "ok, I have enough, I can stop now." And if you had an inclination to supplement your income by dishonesty when you had only $100,000 a year, you'll have the same inclination at $10,000,000 a year.
Simply put, past maybe the poverty limit, more money doesn't make one more honest.
All that's maybe changed is the sum that looks like an acceptable bribe, but no more. But even then, if the only thing that keeps a director honest is that the company is paying him more money than he could steal from it on his own, then that company just replaced an illegal drain with an even bigger drain that it called legal. It's a Baldrick-class cunning plan akin to giving each bank robber a million a month, 'cause it's more than they could find in any bank in cash to rob.
So to cut this long rant short, I might even swallow the argument that such a big pay is needed because of their uber-l33t skills, and the rarity of such skills. Tell me that you need the 0.1% best managers and economists that ever walked the Earth, and I might even see how such a salary would be warranted to secure their services. (Though, then again, the top 0.1% physicists don't make tens of millions a year.) But that they need tens of millions in compensation for doing their job honestly? Heh. Gimme a break.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's telling that Comcast refuses to even ackowledge how bad they screwed up, and in no way suggests that they could improve their service. I think the lesson to be learned is that one woman with a hammer can be ignored.
What would happen though if a thousand, or tens of thousands of unhappy customers walked into Comcast offices across the country and hammered computers and phones into pieces? Would police really arrest a dozen people a day? Would Comcast continue to piss on customers and ignore complaints? Would regulators keep on pretending that there's nothing wrong?
The whole goal of the 800 number, hours on hold, pass the buck, blame the customer routine is to ensure that a company never has to take responsibility for their actions. A voice on the phone can be ignored indefinitely, even cut off with no real repercussions. If customers stop accepting crappy phone service and instead start showing up at Comcast offices for every single problem, perhaps with a hammer or pitchfork in hand, I think that we would see a change. Real live people, especially armed people, cannot be ignored, cannot be hung up on.
Three Squirrels
"when companies gave a dam... when people gave a dam doing their jobs..."
They gave out all their dams on the Colorado and Tennessee rivers, as I recall.
"They stood up in ww2,"
Yeah, they "stood up" with the helpful encouragement of the little man from the draft board.
There is a downside: both are expensive. Not so much for Cogent (well, I'm not paying for that one anyway, work is), but Speakeasy definitely comes at a premium. For the price of my one Speakeasy connection, I could buy one of these "triple-play" packages from one of their competitors. And if my cell service weren't also paid for by my work (I always have to be reachable for work), I would consider it. But in the end, I don't think I would-- it's just not worth it. The last time I lost service, on Christmas eve, I called Speakeasy, and sure enough, someone was there and responded. They tracked it back to the DSLAM (Verizon's DSLAM), and we ended up concluding that getting it fixed was a lost cause until the holiday was over. Sure enough, two days after Christmas, my service was back-- probably whenever the Verizon tech responsible got off his fat arse.
But anyway-- we all know why the "good guys" can't compete. It's because the big telcos have politicians deeply within their pockets. How is Speakeasy going to be cheaper when they have to lease their lines from Verizon for more than Verizon itself charges for the same service? This is why we shelled out billions to the telcos in the 1990's-- they're common carriers. We didn't give them that money to expand their private networks. We gave it to them to expand the national infrastructure. As far as I'm concerned, they're reneging on their contractual obligations to us. And I will not give them a penny if I can help it.
I personally hate Comcast and, though I am one of its 25 million subscribers, I am certainly not satisfied. When I moved two months ago, I told customer service that I wanted to keep my service as it was at my condo (while I slowly moved my stuff) and wanted to set up new service at my new home. Fine they said. A week later the moron tech showed up (late of course) and managed to not bring either a cable box or the equipment for my Internet connection. He claimed it wasn't on his sheet at the warehouse--give me a break. After much hemming and hawing he said he'd be back--this time he came back with half the equipment and a promise to finish later in the day. When all was said and done, he managed to cut off my internet service at my condo and messed up both the internet and cable at my home so nothing worked. Three days later (and countless hours on the phone to customer service) another tech came out and fixed it all. Way to go Comcast!
From "Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork" 1976
A widespread misconception. It is in fact possible to be rich without being evil. However, you do have to be either a spoiled brat or a flaming (though non-evil) asshole. And the first alternative is only available to those in line for an inheritance.
(the converse isn't true, either.... you don't have to be rich to be a spoiled brat, a flaming asshole, or evil).
I also don't have "TV" -- though I have a television and DVD player, I don't have cable, dish or OTA television programming. My wife and I watch about one movie a week. The average USian watches around 5 hours of TV a day, which is hard for me to fathom. Aside from escapism, television has almost nothing positive to offer. Those 5 hours I don't spend with the boob tube is time that I use to talk with my wife, play with my daughter, read, and enjoy various hobbies.
Your point about walking past the apartments is familiar. Sometimes I go for walks at night, and it is eerie to see all the houses with the "blue glow" coming out the front windows. It's also interesting to look at how most homes have the furniture organized--you'll notice that all the furniture in rooms containing a television is oriented toward the TV. You don't see two chairs facing each other so people can sit and talk, you see two chairs facing the television.
Anyway, on to my point: I've often thought that you could make a cool SciFi story about an analog to television, where each evening all the citizens return to their homes and are "programmed" for the next day. But maybe that's a little too close to reality for it to make a comfortable story premise.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
DENIED!
Because...
...and Comcast's (false) advertising claims:
"your calls won't change; they'll only cost less".
Well, um, no, my calls cost more now, that I've switched from (phased-out) Comcast Digital Phone, to (intermittently working) Comcast Digital Voice, to (reliable old analog, but still overpriced) AT&T phone service. After losing tons of my valuable time to switch twice (at Comcast's urging--none of this was my idea; Comcast "threatened" to discontinue my (reliable, relatively-inexpensive, but technology old-fashioned) Comcast Digital Phone, so I had to "act now"). And I'm still resolving billing issues with multiple vendors.
And, no, my calls *did* change, for a while (until I gave up). During four weeks of (really poor) customer service phone calls (dozens of people, so many hours on hold, listening to many falsehoods or displays of ignorance), a half dozen technician visits (some good, some bad), replacement of every wire and piece of Comcast equipment in my house (and bogus double, triple, incorrect, ultimately backed-out billing for all sorts of things instead of their advertised "Free Professional Installation" which consisted of backfeeding the phone signal from a new cable modem to my existing phone jacks, i.e. plugging in one wire=$60!?!), they could *not* get Comcast Digital Voice phones to work reliably at my house: No dial tone and/or noisy, one-way, or dropped calls several times a day (every day for four weeks). And now, I somehow pay more per month, because they "improved" my TV packaging with "free" premium channels, that I've canceled, but somehow I cannot go back to my previous plan.
During the outages, I pointed out that the phone service broke whenever the internet access also broke (pinging an IP address would time-out whenever the phone was dead--I was initially told that this is "impossible" even though the phone is plugged into the cable modem, somehow the phone should always work, even if the cable modem was disconnected? WTF?). I coded a little program to ping a (reliable server) IP address once every minute and log successes and any timeouts; the logs show multi-minute time-outs 10 to 20 times a day, every day (and still does--we just live with it, waiting for a competent internet provider to come along (and we're willing to pay more for reliable internet service).
The Comcast technicians (off the record) blame the decade(s) old wiring under the street (that Comcast has no intention of repairing or replacing). So now I pay more for (reliable, non-Comcast) AT&T analog phone service. Oh, and I signed up with AT&T for a free installation of DishNet Satellite HD-TV/DVR, which looks better than Comcast's, so buh-bye to Comcast's HD HDVR. (I do have to point out that the AT&T and DishNet customer service also sucks, though perhaps less than Comcast's. I'm already thinking of trying DirectTV instead for better baseball coverage than DishNet. I guess I'm an optimist to keep expecting some technology to deliver on its promises.)
I can only hope that either AT&T runs fiber optic cable to the houses in my neighborhood, or moves the "central office" closer to enable DSL, or that Google somehow provides wireless broadband (but I'm in a valley, with really poor cell phone reception). I am so looking forward to dropping Comcast internet (my only viable choice right now; I'm too remote for DSL or Wireless; I telecommute daily and really need internet access to work from home, and I cannot use Satellite because it doesn't work with VPN).
Wouldn't it be great if every home had coax, fiber, and wireless access to a menu of internet, voice, and TV options, where competition drove prices down and drove customer service (the only differentiator) up? How many years away is this?
Anyway, on to my point: I've often thought that you could make a cool SciFi story about an analog to television, where each evening all the citizens return to their homes and are "programmed" for the next day.
Too late. Brave New World had "soma," which was a drug, but essentially was an analogy for television.
Lots of good SF has television-like analogs.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It didn't look like he was excusing it-- it looked like he was explaining it. Statistically, most crimes are committed by people living at or below the poverty line. Are they poor because they are criminals? Or are they criminals because they are poor?
At a subsistence level, living below the poverty line makes one a bit more desperate. That's all he was saying, near as I can read it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Yeah, they "stood up" with the helpful encouragement of the little man from the draft board.
How old are you? Do yourself a favor and read a book or something.
Please step into this time machine and listen to the sounds of the WW2 era. You will learn a lot about America, the country you and I (young people) never knew.
"Evil" is the willingness to fuck over someone else for your own benefit. That's it. That's all.
Excellent analysis of the paradox of the corporation. Question is, how do we fix it?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
When businesses started trying to pinch pennies by buying the cheapest toilet paper they could find, I knew the economics of corporate life were changing for the worse.
The problem is, businesses don't try anymore. Innovation has taken a back seat to profit protectionism, and the people that are suffering the most for this lack of vision, lack of ability, or flat out apathy are the customers.
Quality customer service? "Sorry, that means we have to actually deal with customers. That's never fun - they actually criticise us! The nerve of these people!"
Executive salaries draining the coffers? "No sweat. We go cheap on customer toilet paper and crow about increasing shareholder value. But, uhm, be sure to let the shareholders use the executive washrooms, OK?"
Don't really have a business model? "We don't really do those anymore. It's easier to just buy someone else. If they don't have one, there's always another company out there that might."
Infrastructure maintenance/improvements? "What are you, nuts?!? We'd have to dip into profit! I've got a golf tournament next week, asshole. Do you expect me to take the bus?!?"
Customer realtions? "That's funny! Seriously . . . Funny . . . What do we care about customers? I've got elected officials. Once he signs off on my monopoly, who gives a shit about customers? They buy what I sell whether they like it or not. It's not like they have a choice. Besides, even if they do try and leave, I'll just get my official to mandate ownership, just like the insurance companies did."
"Then, my son . . . then we can begin suing the customers . . . "
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I too am a UU and a Comcast subscriber, and I'm quite proud to be associated with her in this way.
Many might not realize that three of our seven UU principles explicitly promote this type of behavior.
From http://uua.org/visitors/6798.shtml:
They say to the (wo)man with the hammer, "Everything looks like a nail!"
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I had a recent encounter with Comcast. I went to visit my mother, who by the way, has hammers in her garage. She was talking about getting a computer to send email and such. So I called Comcast to check on the price of the Internet connection.
The guy is very friendly and tells me the cost and such.
So I ask, "What is the speed?"
"Six megabits", he says.
I respond, "Is that up and down?" but I knew there was no way.
"384K up and 572K down" he said confidently.
"That doesn't come out to six megabits", I replied.
The next sound I heard was a short click and the recorded message said, "Your expected wait is 30 minutes."
I don't know if someone had told him to do that when he got some techie troublemaker but it sure looked good on the log that he could answer my questions so fast.
(I hung up and called back. The female voice seemed more informed.)
One bit of additional info: I had just tried to call Qwest and got a recording saying they were closed on Saturday.
The troubling thing to me is that both of the main residential Internet providers had serious issues with a potential customer. The old joke points out the difference between prospects and customers. Neither one treated a prospect reasonably. What does that say about the way they treat customers.
"Please step into this time machine and listen to the sounds of the WW2 era."
Oh, yes! Everything I need to know about the period I can glean from the mass media of the time, rubber-stamped by the Office of War Information! Everybody was in favor of fighting in Europe, even though we'd been attacked in the Pacific! And volunteers for the war swelled the ranks of the US military so much, they never had to lower the draft age to 17!
"You will learn a lot about America, the country you and I (young people) never knew."
My grandparents never knew it, either. What you're being spoonfed here is a whitewashed, sterilized version of reality specially prepared for and by the mass media of the time. "Everybody" was happy and cheerful and good little citizens because they wanted you to happily march off to fight Europe's war as well. And as the Supreme Court had ruled for their parents, speaking out against the draft was punishable by imprisonment. So, yeah, everybody was happy with the war and all too willing to serve, especially that 75% of the military that were draftees.
From the article: Being a bunch of fucking pussies who are to scared to even remotely appear that we condone her behavior, lest we lose our spot at the next White House Correspondence dinner, we must note that Comcast pressed charges against her anyway completely their trifecta fuck over of their lost customer. Big Business and Law Enforcement are never wrong and must always prevail. Heil Cheney.
She may just be Kuppa's mother;)
I had a similar problem with my ISP where my connection was constantly dropping. After about four weeks of daily complaining to CS they sent a technician out and in 20 minutes time he found I had a IP conflict with another address. They issued new IP address and have not had problem since
I got a call from the Comcast guy a while back. It was a recorded message but it didn't have a 'if you'd like to be removed from our list, press two' so I pressed one and got a live human.
"Hello, my name is *mumble*, and I'd like to..."
"Hi, please take me off your list."
"But we've got such a great deal! It's just-"
"No. Please take me off your list. I don't even own a television set."
"...well, sir, you don't have to *lie*..."
Click... bzzz. Didn't take me off the list, either.
Takes balls, accusing your potential customer of lying to you and then ensuring that he'll get more calls from your company.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Ben & Jerry's did manage that (the 1:7 ratio) until they were bought out by Unilever.
Not sure how good they were at sticking to the other socially responsible business positions, but from what I understand, even in the segment of the company that is strictly Ben & Jerry's, the 1:7 ratio is no more.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
the idiots. customer is always right.
Read radical news here
What good does this do? Couldn't she have gone to the media, or some other alternative?
I can sympathize with her frustration, but doing something like this is about as effective as yelling at a lowly phone rep over an issue that isn't resolved in the call center. What did she think they were going to do? Not call the police?
The installation tech that came out did a bad job. Fine-- they should have sent someone out to fix her phones. She shouldn't have been ignored. I'm not stating that she has no right to be irritated. Why did she sit on a bench for two hours, rather than be persistent? (She said she was out there this long on an NPR interview).
The best way to get results from organizations like this is to REALLY be annoying, but don't cross the line of property destruction or vulgarity. Sure, it's satisfying to do something like this in the short term, but now this old lady has a criminal record, and she ultimately didn't get Comcast to fix her issue. Personally, I hope that she has to pay recompense for breaking the stuff, just like Comcast should be responsible for paying to fix her stuff. What did she really accomplish?
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
Ha ha. Your ignorance makes your joke seem funny to you. Good one.
This is hardly contested science. --As in, nobody contests it. You want to know more about it? Study advertising, psychology and TV's effect on brain chemistry. Just because you didn't see it on the Discovery Channel doesn't mean that it isn't real.
Do you know why women shave their legs? You probably don't, so I'll tell you. Women shave their legs because razor blade companies realized that they were only selling product to half the population, only to men. So they set about trying to convince the population through advertising that body hair on women was somehow dirty and undesirable. They did a very effective job, so now women feel ashamed to have body hair. That's why women shave their legs.
Advertising IS thought control, and it is the simplest kind, driven by greed as opposed to fear. There are other kinds. --One of which is designed to make chumps like you ridicule anybody who points out the man behind the curtain. You need to start learning how this stuff works, or you will find yourself existing in a perpetual state of stupid.
But hey, as long as you're stupid, your jokes will still seem funny to you. Bonus! Who needs reality?
-FL
Just because I've unplugged doesn't mean I don't still need to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. Or are you suggesting that I not use words or concepts if they could not be derived from my current way of living? Do you actually believe you've invalidated the point and that TV is healthy for you?
-FL
The internet is not television. The internet is a two-way communication technology which allows people like us to share and build and examine ideas as we are doing right now. People engaged in this manner on the internet exhibit heightened activity in numerous parts of the brain. --The more work you put into reading and thinking and using your brain in a dynamic way, the more you get back. TV, on the other hand, is a one-way medium and people's brain activity drops off within the first few seconds of viewing to levels similar to those in coma victims. --The fluorescing light from a TV screen is largely responsible for this effect.
-FL
I hear what the old lady is talking about. I have had the worst experience with these morons. They are very cocky and think they are internet gods. They must hire Nazis on a strict basis. I am thinking about doing what the old lady did, except I will use a large caliber and clean the place out!!! Maybe then they will wake up and start acting like a common carrier.
Just make sure to check their portfolio. If "New Orleans" appears on it, it might not be such a deal.
Oops. I'll stop and be good now.
god you really know how to kill a joke :) Come on, lets just roll with it.. please ;)
to think I stuck with comcast tv/internet when i moved despite the dish tv antenna already on the house, because i figured that cable had to be more reliable than a satellite connection. i'm still intermittent, despite having had the drop cable from the pole to the house replaced; i assume that more of the neighborhood cable needs replacement. Then it struck me; when your major real asset is the network of installed cable, and an unknown amount of it is either too old or too decrepit or both to handle the bandwidth you're peddling now; i'd be whistling past the graveyard too. while i'm at it, who designed the interface for comcast tv? nuff said. and their DVR; functions as well as if it were running windows. nuff said. but the customer service is what's great. friend of mine moved, got comcast internet/tv/phone. so far so good. hey, why not push your luck, get them to install a wireless network. haha. worked well enough for the tech to leave; that was it, though. followed literally hours and hours of being transferred between tech support for the network; the internet gateway; they even transferred to Macafee support. and round and round and round. Finally, four days later, another tech came out and plugged the network adapter into the USB port in back of the machine (Dell, BTW) instead of the front. bingo. any of you in the same boat, there's hours of phone service time saved. So I'm just mulling it over; is it less trouble to have comcast come out to take another whack at my system, or just go to dish and forget it?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.