the comcast local monopoly sucks

I pay Comcast $155.00 a month for TV and fast internet — baring the download limits I never hit, It is an acceptable service, even if still overpriced.

Yesterday I got a call from Comcast.  I didn’t think much of it.  At least how I remember it, the lady said the Auto-bill pay had made a mistake and over charged me for July.  $240 instead of $155 or something.  And they noticed this mistake, and had corrected it. Great so.. I should just be getting a credit. Woohoo money back I never noticed leaving.

Today when I woke up, the internet wasn’t working.

It was showing a stupid comcast activation screen.  To activate… it wanted me to download some comcastic activation software.  Screw it, I was feeling particularly dumb this morning and I did on my older Macbook Pro.  It completely FUBARed up my network settings.  Glad I didn’t do it on my primary work machine.

Okay, well, one dead laptop later, I decided to call Comcast.

I will give Comcast some credit here, I was speaking to a Real Human Being in less than 2 minutes.  I remember being on hold for USWest/Qwest for hours when dealing with any DSL issues.

I just try to play dumb, ‘my internet has stopped working’, and the lady says it was turned off for non-payment.

Non-payment? I’ve had auto-bill pay on for 4 years, since I moved in.  I have auto-bill-pay with Comcast because I never ever ever want to deal with their crap or be on the phone with them. I WANT FAST INTERNET AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

It turns out that $242 was from someone ELSE who had paid onto MY account in June.

What happened yesterday is that Comcast reversed that payment, and since the auto-bill pay thought I had already paid for June and most of July, and now I had a delinquent charge of $242, overdue for 2 months.

So they turned off my service.

Well, turning off my service for when they fucked up sure is one way to get my attention.

So, I paid $403 to keep the internet flowing.  It isn’t like I had a choice in high speed internet.

In my rage I did change my TV plan from Digitial Rare-Metal to the basic standard plan, but I wish I could of just canceled my entire account.

If I had a choice, I would choose any other service that can offer me 20 megabit/second downloads.

AT&T in theory can offer DSL service in my area, but I don’t have a landline, and they don’t offer anywhere near 20mbit/second downloads.

Sigh. Edit: While writing this post, Safari crashed. Twice.  :rage: