That’s right, welcome to the Great Salt Blog. I finally have internet in my apartment and I feel civilized again. It’s amazing how a technology that I didn’t really know existed 10 years ago has now become so important to my daily life.
Anyway, here’s the saga: Before we moved I called Comcast and told them to cancel my internet and then called the Comcast here in Salt Lake to schedule an install time. They told me Saturday between 12 and 2pm. Great! Not only was it a relatively small window, it would mean just one day in our apartment before I was online again. So my wife took her sister (who was an immense help during the move) shopping at one of the local malls and to the airport while I waited for the tech to arrive. Well, at 2:30 I finally called Comcast to see what was up. They told me that the ticket was actually for 1-5pm, so I should call back if they didn’t show up by 5. Ugh. So at 5:15 I called again…the lady called the dispatcher and came back and told me the tech would be here in 10-15 minutes. Also, during the time I was on hold waiting for the customer service person to call the dispatcher I got a phone call from the tech saying that she was about 10 minutes away. Ok.
So 6:10 hit and I can’t believe it. Nobody, not even a phone call. I called back again and was put on hold while she called the dispatcher, and again there’s a call on my cell (which I didn’t answer because I was on hold with the customer service person). While on hold I watched an SUV drive slowly by the house with a ladder on top and a cone. I assumed that this very well might be the person, but I wasn’t sure (and Comcast installers have always shown up in Comcast vans/trucks before). So the customer service person came back on and said “she says she’s at your place now, working.” WHAT? I tried to clarify that, at best, she was sitting in her truck in front of my next-door-neighbor’s house, but the customer service person was done talking, so I hung up. Apparently slowly driving by and parking by the curb constitutes “working” for this independent contractor. So she came in, said something about “Jerry’s wife went into labor”, which would have been a valid excuse if she had called me and said, “hey, I’m going to be late because I’m covering someone else’s workload” and hadn’t promised she’d be there in 10 minutes, only to show up an hour later! So she walked into my office and was surprised that I had my own modem, even though I told the person on the phone, and it was even printed on the work order she had with her. So she went out and fiddled with the line, then came in and was mystified by Firefox, which she kept calling “Mozilla browser” or Foxfire. I had to show her that when you download a file, you need to click “open” next to the filename in the download manager. She also ended up downloading the same file to my desktop four times….not realizing that it was already there. And she spends her day working with computers?!?
Oh, I forgot to mention that another “tech” randomly showed up and came in, apparently to hang out with Tech #1 while she stumbled through my computer. They complained to each other about setting up the internet on Macs and about how confusing my dual-monitor set up is. Yeah, tricky concept. Sheesh. Anyway, after a few minutes she called to register my modem and was told that it wouldn’t work because my modem was still on my account in Oregon. She hung up, and told me that I had two options: 1) she could leave the “self-install-kit” (basically, a program she downloaded from Comcast’s website) and I could finish the install when it resolved off my account in Oregon, which she said should be Monday afternoon, or 2) I could schedule another tech visit to run this program and get it working after Monday afternoon. Which do you think I chose? So she filled out the little receipt and told me to do the standard “sign here, initial here, here, and here.” I did this because I was pissed and wanter her to leave. After she left I looked at the receipt and she had checked the box for “arrived on time during the appointment window”!!!!! So ticked.
So, not trusting “techy #1″ I called Comcast on Sunday to see if they could verify this problem and perhaps push it through faster. So the person tried to register the modem, couldn’t, and then tried to access my account in Oregon to remove the modem. For some reason she wasn’t able to do so, and told me that because I owned my own modem that had been used in another state I had to take my modem into the Comcast store and they would register it there. And of course the store isn’t open on Sundays.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I had been emailed some information pertaining to my new job prior to the move. Due to a serious lapse in judgment, I though that since my internet was being installed on Saturday, I could double check the information by logging into my email on Sunday. Obviously this was not the case. Luckily, my friend here in town graciously let me use his connection for a bit so I’d know where to go this morning.
So after work today I tried to run the self install program one more time (after all, Idiot Tech #1 told me it would work by this afternoon) and it didn’t work. So I drove all the way down to the Comcast store and waited in line 15 minutes, only to get a confused look from the woman working at the counter. “They told you to come in here?!?” Luckily, she was both nice and competent, and she worked on the problem for about half an hour. I told her the whole story and she told me that they have a derogatory name for the independent contracting company that sent Idiot Tech #’s 1 and 2 to my house. She then said that they charged me $100 for the “install”, but she took it off my account since they didn’t do much of anything. So after calling tech support two different times and looking up all sorts of information in her computer, we reached the solution that I would use on of their modems for now, until they straighten out the mess with my old account. Apparently the tech support she was talking to had to email someone here in Utah who could call the right person back in Oregon to get the modem off my account. Good grief Charlie Brown!
Well, that was quite the long rant, all to say: I am not so happy with Comcast, but I have internet now. So yay that. I’ll soon post some about Salt Lake. But it’s late, and I have another 8 hours of Human Resources presentation tomorrow.
