Comcast connection going to sleep, so I guess I will too

I’ve had a fairly relaxing day today. Amazing how much better I feel after a day where I didn’t fight with my ISP for several hours. However, it’s now 11:30 and my Comcast connection is dying for the second time today so I guess I’ll turn in for the evening too.

I wonder if I’ll get to read the news tomorrow morning when I get up?

Other people’s problems

A quick search on Technorati shows me that other people are blogging about their issues with Comcast.

A dedicated Ravens fan goes to a Internet coffee shop to get service since his Comcast connection isn’t working. Over at Geekster.org it doesn’t sound like he’s doing much better, and the guy at HaveYouMetTony.com sounds like he’s having the same frequent drop problems I am.

There’s even a woman in my neck of the woods (Atlanta) who wrote a poem about her troubles with Comcast before she switched to BellSouth.

Even famous people can have trouble with Comcast

Well, he’s famous on the Web, at least. Dave Winer, one of the first bloggers and the man widely considered to be the creator of RSS and one the creators of podcasting, recently had some trouble with his Comcast service.

First I have to convince them it’s not the modem, because every time they’re absolutely sure it is my modem, even though the seven times before it wasn’t. I ask them to check the other customers in my building. It seems about four times out of five this really pisses them off, because I get a lecture about how I have to make an appointment, and give up a day of my time so they can have a repairman visit, why I don’t know. So I usually say goodbye at that point, and try again. More often than not the second person is sympathetic, and we test the other modems in the building and (surprise!) find out that either they all failed at exactly the same moment, or there’s some other problem that has nothing to do with the modems. Even so, before they’re willing to investigate, I have to make an appointment.

Yep, that’s sounds about right.

Lazy Sunday for Comcast

I’m a little surprised it took this long, but at 4:55 on Sunday my connection dropped. I was able to do the Comcast Shuffle and revive the connection, but just barely. It’s horribly slow will often pop in and out while I’m trying to read my emails. Posting this and the previous post is taking forever trying to type a little, save, then type a little more and save again before the connection drops. (Most of the time I get bumped offline and just type in Notepad and then transfer to the blog later when the connection returns.)

Anyway, I called Comcast just so they have a record of my outage. I’m still waiting for a return call from the gentleman that Allie has supposedly put my case in front of so I don’t really even want to speak with Comcast and muddy any waters. However, I want them to have a record of every time my connection drops.

So, I talked to Daniel from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. I suppose all Internet-related calls go to Ft. Lauderdale. I had thought it was randomly spread out through FL and GA, but I always seem to get FL. (Probably some kind of Karma thing since I fled the state 8 years ago.) Daniel was nice enough. I explained that I had what I hope for their sake is an usually bad case and that I was waiting for a call back from someone whose job it is to handle these type of cases. All I wanted from him was to mark down that my connection dropped again today and I would let him move on to another call.

That was easy enough for him. Before going he asked me if I wanted the ticket number. I have no idea what that is and the last number I got from Comcast was a “job number”, which didn’t seem to mean anything to the next person I spoke with. But I took it anyway. It’s cr068815896 (if anyone from Comcast should be reading this).

The sleeping Comcast guy video

I know it’s old news by now, but some probably haven’t seen it yet. Besides, what kind of Comcast blog would I have if I didn’t post it?

Here’s the link.

Sorry I didn’t embed the video. WordPress.com doesn’t seem to allow that. They claim to have a workaround, but I couldn’t get it to work.