Given that Comcast has more than 20 million customers spread out around the country, you’d think it would have figured out how to handle billing two subscribers with the same name. But apparently the company is utterly baffled by this notion and has no problem with taking away one customer’s longtime e-mail address and giving it another subscriber, while at the same time sending the new customer’s bill to the wrong person.

First Coast News in Florida has the story of a Jacksonville woman who woke one morning in April to find that her Comcast e-mail account, the one she’d been using as her primary e-mail address for 13 years, had vanished.

“Your bank, your doctor, everybody you know has had that same e-mail address” she explains.

Comcast, in its infinite ineptitude, had given that e-mail address away to a new customer with the same name who lives nearly 1,100 miles away in Michigan.

Compounding the problem, that new customer’s bill was now being sent to the Jacksonville customer.

“When that bill comes past due and it’s time for that to be shut off, it’s gonna be my account that is shut off, not hers,” says the Florida customer, who claims that she’s been told by 18 different Comcast reps that, “Oh, within 24 to 72 hours… everything will be solved.”

None of those promises were fulfilled, and so she turned to FCN. Within an hour of the reporter calling Comcast, the company said it was working on fixing the issue.

One of the reasons we opposed the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable was Comcast’s well-established inability to resolve disputes involving customers in different districts. If the company can’t sort out a problem between two accounts in areas it already serves, why should it have been given the chance to screw up 10 million new customers?

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