My Zen Arcade

Anyhow…here’s two situations I was in recently.

1. Comcast: We had called Comcast before moving and asked them if we needed to do anything to get our high speed internet in our new house.  They said the house is already wired fine, so we should just be able to hook up a cable modem and be good to go.

2. Empire Carpet: We made an appointment with Empire Carpet at our previous residence, about 90 minutes away.  The window was 1-3pm.  At 2:42, I missed a call from Empire and when I called back (2:47pm), I was told my appointment had been cancelled.

Results:

Comcast: They apologized, said they were obviously wrong, and when I asked about them getting someone out here to fix the problem, it was going to be two days.  Which cost me a day of work.  I explained that this would cost me a day of work, but that didn’t seem to help.

Empire: These folks actually seemed to care that the total time I’d spent on this was going to be upwards of 5 hours, plus another 3+ hours for the next appointment.  I explained to them that I’d taken a day off from work for this as well.  They put me on hold and a few minutes later they had a new guy coming out to see me.

Do you see the difference?

In both cases, some amount of mistake/misjudgement/error or whatever had occured.  In both cases, it was the responsibility of the service provider.

Empire seems to understand that.  Comcast doesn’t.

Every time I deal with a Comcast rep, I explain to them that the only reason we are still with them for high-speed internet is because they are CURRENTLY the only game in town.  The moment we can get away from them, we will.  Of course, the people I talk to don’t make policy, and the people that do don’t take my calls, so its all vaguely pointless.  But still I try.