“I don’t know what else to do.” That’s what I kept saying to the help desk person on the other end of the line.
That was nearly two hours ago. After enduring near daily service drops since last year, I broke down and pleaded with ComCast to send a technician out to my house. He/she was supposed to be here between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. today. At 8:15, he had still not arrived so I called ComCast. (I call often enough that I have their number in my cell phone’s address book.) After confirming that I indeed wanted my call to continue in English, a recording stated that I had a service appointment scheduled for today between 5 and 8. If I wanted to reschedule that appointment, press 1. Assuming that this might get me to someone who works with the service calls, that’s the option I choose.
I choose poorly. After 25 minutes of sitting on hold, I hung up and called back. This time I simply choose the option to talk to a support person. This option only took 15 minutes to get through.
The tech support person who answered was very polite, but she insisted that the call I had scheduled for today was a “special request” call. I assume because the day before I specially requested that they please get my service working again. Unfortunately, a special request call seemed to mean that they did not need to enter the home. When I explained that I was home from 4:30 on and never saw anyone she said I must have missed them. Either way the technician claimed to have showed up and found nothing wrong.
This didn’t surprise me in the least as that is exactly what the last tech did, and I pointed this out to the help desk person. Even telling her that I had predicted as much to the help desk person I had spoken with the day before. However, since I have been dealing with service failures for the better part of a year, perhaps this wasn’t the case. In fact, I told her that I had tested my connection using a popular speed test while I was on hold (I had the time) and found that my upload speeds were nearly dial-up slow. After a few seconds she confirmed that my line appeared weak.
It was after 9 by this point. I was exhausted – physically and mentally. I was tired of explaining to the support person that while my connection was running now (albeit slow), it could go out at any time. It went out yesterday and again this morning. There’s no reason to think it will make it another day without dropping. That was my life for the past 8 to 10 months.
“So what’s the next step,” I said quietly … already knowing what the answer would be.
“Well, sir, I’ll schedule a technician to come out.”
“Awesome,” I said with all the conviction of an old man sitting in retirement home waiting to die. “Will he actually show up?”
“I’ve escalated your ticket to the supervisor level. They should be able to take care of the problem. Can I help you with anything else today?”
At this point, I really had no other option. I thanked her for her time and wrote on the pad in front of me “Cable Guy – Saturday, 11 to 2.”
