Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job

ub3r n3u7r4l1st writes When you complain to your cable company, you certainly don't expect that the cable company will then contact your employer and discuss your complaint. But that's exactly what happened to one former Comcast customer who says he was fired after the cable company called a partner at his accounting firm. Be careful next time when you exercise your first amendment rights. From the article: At some point shortly after that call, someone from Comcast contacted a partner at the firm to discuss Conal. This led to an ethics investigation and Conal’s subsequent dismissal from his job; a job where he says he’d only received positive feedback and reviews for his work. Comcast maintained that Conal used the name of his employer in an attempt to get leverage. Conal insists that he never mentioned his employer by name, but believes that someone in the Comcast Controller’s office looked him up online and figured out where he worked. When he was fired, Conal’s employer explained that the reason for the dismissal was an e-mail from Comcast that summarized conversations between Conal and Comcast employees. But Conal has never seen this e-mail in order to say whether it’s accurate and Comcast has thus far refused to release any tapes of the phone calls related to this matter.

Comments

Comcast needs to go the route of AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

Break them up, don't let them merge so that the abuses can continue.

Not the first amendment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful next time when you exercise your first amendment rights.

As the government did not arrest this person for what they said, it has nothing to do with the first amendment.

We don't know the details

[ShaunC]

I can't help but think that there's more to this story. I hate Comcast and it's fun to rail on them, but there's no proof yet that they've done anything horrible here. What appears to have happened is that a customer used his position (or knowledge he gained through his position) at work to escalate his own personal billing issue to someone at Comcast who had zero to do with the situation, and it backfired. Until or unless the recording of the phone call is made public, nobody really knows what went down and everything else is useless speculation.

There are plenty of 100% legitimate, proven reasons to hate Comcast. This might not be one of them.

Re:We don't know the details

[AK Marc]

He basically threatened them with reporting them to the IRS and SEC for violating accounting standards, and he didn't just threaten a nobody, he threatened another accountant.

Then he's an idiot. When I had trouble with AT&T DSL back in the '90s, I couldn't ever get anyone to talk to me. I used my "work position" to try to escalate. "I work for a tech company doing tech, I understand these things."

Nothing worked.

I didn't push the issue after the 6th month or so of problems. I sent a letter to the FCC about the deceptive practices, copying the 12 divisions of SBC that were involved in delivering AT&T DSL at the time, and to AT&T's corporate council.

Within 48 hours of putting the letter in the mailbox, I had an AT&T tech at my house and the problem I was told for 6 months was "impossible" to fix, was fixed.

Don't ever threaten to go to a regulatory body. Just do it. Of course let them know, so that when the FCC got back to my complaint another 6 weeks later, I could tell them it was resolved.

We are not hearing the full story.

[Frosty Piss]

Look, we all hate Comcast, but something is fishy here about this guy. I will go as far as saying that the write-up is one-sided, and if "true", the employer has opened themselves up to a lawsuit, and I really don't think HR and their lawyers would do this.

We are not hearing the full story.

Re: Time To Occupy Comcast HQ?

[roc97007]

I would say this is the opposite of capitalism. Lack of consumer choice, paying off politicians to achieve an unquestioned monopoly, no need to provide a decent service because there's no competition. That's more like a government sponsored monopoly.

Re:So, it has come to this.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a nice false dichotomy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it... But seriously, there's a huge gulf between at-will and what you describe. I know of a small business where the receptionist is frequently rude to clients and spends more time on places like Facebook than actual work. So even if this small business had to show good cause for firing this receptionist, it wouldn't be that difficult a bar to meet. You just have to show some business related reason for firing the person, as opposed to "I don't like the color of your shoelaces. Get out, you're fired!"

What I don't get is that the US was founded upon the principles of everyone being equal and entitled to some kind of due process... Except when it comes to private business, when suddenly that whole idea goes out the window according to certain political philosophies. Ironically the same political philosophies often espouse ideals about freedom from oppression and decry dictators petty, tinpot, or otherwise. I've never been able to figure out how they reconcile such a disconnect where oppression from governments is the single greatest evil, but the same kind of oppression from private business is not only perfectly acceptable, it's a desirable outcome.