Tech calls nets nothing

Got my connection back for a few minutes last night so I tried to post the updates to this blog, but the connection didn’t last long enough to make the posting. Mildly upset by this point, I called Comcast just to see if they could refresh my line or work whatever magic at their disposal to just get me up and running long enough to make my blog updates.

Talked to Elika down in FL. Told her my connection was out, here’s my phone number, my name is, the other name on the account is (because I’m renting and they refuse to remove the last occupant of this residence from the account), and my address is.

She took all that down and also asked me for the mac address of my modem. This is the third time I’ve been asked this now, so I asked her if that’s a new thing. I had their phone number, voicemail prompts and initial questions memorized pretty well. But this was new. Elika explained that there are two modems on my account so they had to confirm which one was having the problems.

Great. So when the replaced my modem on Saturday they didn’t remove the other one from my account. I told her this and asked if she could remove the old one from my account, but to no surprise she could not. I guess I have something else to memorize while I’m on my daily hold with Comcast support.

New domains

I never announced this during the last go-around with Comcast because they were close to fixing my problems by that time. But I purchased a few domain names to make this site easier to reach.

I did a little shopping on GoDaddy and now you can reach this blog by going straight to JustSayNoToComcast.com, as well as SayNoToComcast.com and NoToComcast.com. GoDaddy is so cheap and easy to deal with (strange concept to folks like Comcast, I’m sure) that I figured I’d buy a few that way I had some choices.

Comcast chaos, round 2

Sigh … the good times lasted about a month. Or a little less.

About a week or so ago I started having problems again. It started with a dropped signal that I was able to correct with a Comcast Shuffle. Then a day or so later the connection dropped and I wasn’t able to get it back. I called tech support and they said there was no problem in the area as far as they knew. So we tried to get the problem fixed over the phone, but weren’t successful. I told the woman that I didn’t want to put in a tech call yet, though. I was still hoping that it was just a problem in the area – one that had not been reported to the tech support offices in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The next day it was working again.

But that evening the problems were back so a tech call was placed to my house to swap out the modem. The tech thought that was the problem and since we never replaced my modem during the last round of problems, I was hopeful that he was right.

He was wrong.

The new modem didn’t help at all and I’m back to losing the signal at least once a day. It’s out when I get up in the morning and it’s usually out when I return home in the evening. Sometimes I can get it back, but most times I can’t. If I leave my browser up, I can see that email comes in during the night. But by 6 a.m. when I get up, the connection is gone.

Everything is exactly as it was the last time.

Now mind you, I’ve changed nothing except the modem (which was after the problems started). No need Ethernet card, no new router, no new computer, nothing. In fact, I’ve been so busy between work and watching TV now that football is back, I’m doing much less on the computer than I was before the problems started last time. I barely download any podcasts, haven’t built any new sites (which is a lot of uploading and downloading of files), and can’t remember the last time I bought any music online.

I honestly wish I was the problem because then at least I could fix the situation by changing my behavior. But it’s not me.

Today I called Andrea – one of the folks who helped fix my problems last time. It’s 9 p.m. now and I called her mid-afternoon so I guess I’m not getting a return today. Hopefully she’ll call me tomorrow. If not, I’ll start calling some of the other contacts I made last time.

This is very frustrating. I thought I was past all of this. Couldn’t even make it a full month. Wow.