I have been living in Comcast Hell.
All of a sudden my home phone stopped working. When I finally figured it out (it may have
been down for days), I called Comcast and got the recorded message that the
phone lines were experiencing difficulties in my area.
Okay. Fine. So I waited.
Hours. Days.
I finally called back, and the girl on the phone ran a check
on the modem feed. I never had to worry
about modem feeds when I had the old phone system, but Comcast sucked me in
with a year of savings only to turn around and screw the crap out of my monthly
bank account later on. The girl told me
to unplug the phone line from the jack and plug it into "line 1" of
the modem.
Well, if anyone has ever looked on the back of the modem,
you'd see that "line 1" is so microscopic that it's impossible to
see. After I finally figured out which
of the many open spaces she meant, this act restored the phone service to one
phone, that one jack, but not to my other phones. So I booked a service appointment for the
following evening, called it a night, and went to bed.
The next day there was a Comcast van next door when I got
home from work, three hours before my scheduled appointment. I almost went up to the van and left a note: Hey, I'm home. Feel free to move my appointment up. I wasn't sure if it would be the same
technician, though, so I just waited.
Impatiently. As usual.
Eventually I could hear Mike, the Comcast Guy, calling my
cell phone from right outside my door. I
knew it was Mike because he said, "Hi, this is Mike from Comcast,"
and it came through in stereo on my cell and through the screen of the open
living room window. We laughed about how
he had to kill time between the installation next door and my appointment. He had been working in my former apartment (a
neighboring house), so he gave me the skinny on the new electrical rewiring job
at the old place. When I used to turn on
the furnace for the first time every October, the attic would always catch on
fire. Go figure.
Mike came into the house, looked at the modem, and
immediately determined that Phone Girl should have told me to plug the modem
cable into Line 1 not the wall jack wire.
Once he made the switch, my phones all came back online. Voila!
Ten second fix.
I apologized profusely and told him I hope he got paid by
the hour for the time he had to spend just coming over here. He said it was okay; he was filing today's
appointment as a code 666 (evil and clever): Phone coordinator error.
"You shouldn't have been given an appointment. She should've been able to walk you through
this on the phone. I'm sorry I took up
your time."
I was back in business before my scheduled appointment time
was supposed to even begin. Almost
immediately my phone started to ring. So
much for silence. I'm back out of
Comcast Hell, or maybe I just fell back into it. Either way, the phone lines are open and
ready for business. One ringee-dingee,
two ringee-dingees…
