Garrett M. Vonk

So, this has been a pretty boring week at home. The reason? On Tuesday, our cable blinked out some time during the day. From my own in-depth analysis of the Tivo, we can tell that it was sometime between the morning rerun of The Daily Show and what would have been Ken Jennings’s forty-somethingth win. I’ve gotta believe the suits at Sony Pictures and King World are at least carriers of the capitalism gene, and thus will produce a DVD set of the incredible (rumored to end at 75 times) championship of Ken Jennings.
Where was I? Oh, the cable.

So, I called up Comcast and explained. Customer service at most big utility companies (perhaps justifiably) treats everyone like an absolute retard. They put you through the rigamarole of attempting to find every single way that you could have screwed up before they’re willing to even consider that they may have done something wrong. I understand this policy. It probably makes them money in the end. But our cable just stopped working. It’s not like I plugged 75 splitters into each outlet and bought 6 black-market cable boxes while trying to electrocute the cat with the batteries from the three dollar universal remote that somehow costs $95 to replace. The cable worked in the morning. It didn’t when I got home. It’s really not any harder to understand than that. But they act as if I made a conscious effort to disable the cable. Yes, Joann from Comcast, just like you want nothing more than to sit at a 20-inch wide mini-cubicle and read a script to housewives who “dusted” their cable boxes with 12 ounces of Armor-All, I have nothing to do all day but sit around and try to get my cable to stop working, so that I can call and beg for the privilege of devoting a third of my weekend to waiting on your technicians.
Ohh, the technicians…
Right after we moved in, we got our cable turned on and scheduled our service call for a Tuesday. (The brilliant and efficient company charges you $50 to drive their van over to your house, and screw one wire into another one, so that you can continue to pay them $50 a month.) The call was for 5-8pm. I got in at 4:50 and there was a note on the door saying “sorry we missed you.” There was an answering machine message left just after noon saying they’d be there a little early. I’m sorry, Comcast. I didn’t know that when you said “be there 5-8″, you forgot to also add “and also be there the whole day in case we call. You know, because we’re really busy plugging these wires in and might have to call you.”

The next time they came, when they were bringing us our digital cable box, we had an appointment from 11-2 on a Saturday. I was out at 10:30 but got in at 10:50 or so to another answering machine message. “Comcast here. I guess you’re not home. Please reschedule the appointment…” was the message left… AT 10:45 AM. If you want me to be at home at a given time, just tell me. I was THERE for my appointment, YOU weren’t. YOU probably called all your calls for the day at a time OUTSIDE the appointment time, so that you could sit in your van all day.

The next appointment we had, I made sure to be home for a period of approximately seventy-five hours preceding the appointment time and just managed to catch the technician, when he showed up, without calling, 2 hours into the appointment. And installed an extra cable box. Which they claimed we ordered. And billed us for. And when the technician was in my house, on his way out the door, I told him that we didn’t order the second cable box and we wouldn’t be paying for it. To which he shrugged: “Call and have someone come pick it up.”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to it”, I replied.

So ANYWAY, the point of all of this is that finally, today, just in time for the Georgia/Tennessee game (more on that in a second), twenty minutes before the scheduled appointment, our fourth cable repairman came. His diagnosis? Comcast just *turned off* our cable. Someone tagged our apartment as not paying for cable, and “auditors” unplugged our cable, just for fun.

I don’t even have the energy to address that insanity. It’s back on now, and I talked Comcast into giving us at least a credit for the downtime.

So now I just finished watching the Presidential Debate from yesterday, and I am reminded of something wise I read, which I will now paraphrase without attribution.

You know things are bad when the (Republican) President is boasting about his prescription drug entitlement plan, and (Democratic) Senator Kerry is complaining about deficit spending.