Why I hate Comcast, in 1,000 words or less

Booo!!!!!!

So, as some of you may have noticed, there has been a bit of radio silence here at the Flaviana Blog.  Well, it hasn't been because I haven't been itching to post our chronicles in MN.  The fault lies with an awful, awful company known as Comcast.




To be honest, I've never been a huge Comcast fan. My moderate dislike of Comcast began about 2 years ago when Flav and I moved to Jersey City from Manhattan and had to give up our far superior cable service with Time Warner.  But, to be fair, most of my bad attitude toward NJ Comcast had to do with our loss of NY1 and local NYC morning favorite, "In the Papers."  (for non-New Yorkers not in on the joke, this is a ridiculous segment in the NY1 morning programing where Pat Kiernan, snarky morning host extraordinaire, literally holds up copies of the local NYC papers, reads the headlines aloud and adds a last minute sarcastic quip - see below)



But I digress..... In any event, I really began drinking some Comcast Hatorade after our move to MN.  Needless to say, our experience with Comcast in the Twin Cities has been nothing less than awful.

Our Comcost woes began approximately 1 month ago on August 25, when our cable was installed.  See, the trouble started with a little glitch in the ol' Comcast computer system - our apartment number was recorded as "101" not the correct "104."  This error was originally caught by the gravely voiced man who came to install our cable, and to be fair to "gravel voice", he did try to fix the mistake before hooking up our cable.  Unfortunately, the person "gravel voice" spoke to at Comcast HQ was asleep at the switch and they did NOT fix the address related glitch before our cable was hooked up.  And (not clear why a typo would cause such havoc) but this little glitch led to us having some really jacked up cable for our first month in MN - non-working DVR, poor picture quality on Flavio's futbol channels and worst of all, AMC would randomly stop working every Sunday between the hours of 9:00-10:00 CDT, i.e. Mad Men time!!! ARGH!!!!  (for the record, I've been a Mad Men fan since Season 1, before it started winning Emmys - so I'm not on the bandwagon.  I legit like the show and get angry when I miss a new episode - random tangent complete)

So, in response to the jacked up'dness nature of our cable, I made over a dozen phone calls to Comcast to both correct our address and to switch our cable service to "not jacked up."  While I did have the pleasure of going lawyer on the reps and successfully negotiated close to a month of free cable (SCORE), most of said calls left me frustrated, angry and wishing that I could travel through the phone to punch the unhelpful Comcast representative.  And all of the calls ended with the rep saying "Miss, I'm going to need to escalate your call, can we call you back?"  But they NEVER CALLED BACK!!! And I would have to call them again and waste another hour of my life talking to an unhelpful Comcast rep. 

During call # 10, on Wed, Sept 15, I spoke to an absurd man named Charles who went through an incredibly creepy verification process that went something like this - Charles: " so your name is AHH-NAHH, POH-Traaazzzzah, AHH- Coh-Stahhh.  I just love your middle name, POHHH-TRAAZZ. It's reeaalll ethnic.  Mmm, down to the food."  Me: "Um, that's actually my maiden name.  It's German.  Not too ethnic a background in MN.  Can you just fix my cable please?"  After he got his letch in check, Charles went all business and assured me that the switch from Apt 101 to Apt 104 would be complete on Friday, Sept 17 and all of the problems making our cable not awesome would resolve themselves.  When Sept 17 rolled around, not surprisingly, all was not resolved.  In fact, the situation was much worse - our cable and internet was completely shut off!!!  For 5 days!!  Needless to say, 5 days as an unemployed lady with no nook or TV makes you go completely stir crazy - one day during the cable blackout I even went to the MOA in the middle of a scrapbooking convention.  I was actually that bored!!!

And yes, I know what I sound like. "Woe is me!! I'm a bored housewife being supported by my husband and I'm so angry that my fancy cable isn't working."  But, you know what, TV is one of my few vices, so forgive me for getting mad when the cable goes out.

So on Tuesday, Sept 21, a technician FINALLY came to restore our cable connection.  At last, we had functioning cable.  Or so I thought.... DVR is still broken and a rep is coming tomorrow to replace the defective DVR box. To be continued........

Oh, Pat Kiernen, I miss you so:(

NY 1 in my Heart...