You call up the cable company, schedule an appointment, take off time from work and they don’t show up. You’ve heard, or told, the story many a time. In fact, we receive this same complaint several times a month.

There’s gotta be a better method for doing cable installation, internet installation, and phone installation, some kind of futureworld routing system. It may simply be known as “showing up when you say you’re going to.”

Until then, we have Jenna’s Comcast snafu, after the jump.

Jenna writes:

“This may seem like a minor complaint, but it annoyed me sufficiently that I feel like venting in your general direction.

We have cable service with Comcast (also Internet and digital voice, so we pay them waaaay more money than we should). A couple of weeks ago, one of our boxes went on the fritz and I called their helpline to schedule a repair. This was a Thursday, and I arranged for someone to come out on the following Saturday. Instead, Thursday evening, a dispatcher called my husband at work and said the techs were at our house and wondered why no one was home. He explained that we’d arranged for a Saturday visit, and she apologized for the error and confirmed that someone would come out on Saturday, between 11 and 2.

I hung around all morning on Saturday waiting for a tech, and at 2 I called the Comcast helpline. The guy who answered looked up our record and said that we’d instead been scheduled for Friday and the tech had reported that…drum roll…no one was home. I explained that this was the second time in a row their helpdesk had been unable to determine what day “Saturday” is, and I was less than pleased at having wasted a morning waiting for a repairman. He said that he would put me down for a “VIP” call, which meant that I would be put at the top of the repairman’s work list, and he would get to me some time that day. So I waited the rest of the day.

Around 5 p.m. I received a call from someone at Comcast, asking if we were still having trouble with our cable box. I replied uneasily that we were, and she said that she would go ahead and schedule a repair call. As smoke began trickling out my ears, I explained the situation and informed her that we were supposed to be scheduled for a repair
that very day. She looked at our record and said that she didn’t see anything about that. I asked to speak with a manager, but she said that there was no one on the floor and asked if I wanted to have one call me back. I certainly did, but no one ever called.

I e-mailed a complaint about my experience to Comcast, and received a boilerplate apology and an assurance that a manager would call me todiscuss the situation. I never received a call. I have since spoken to someone at Comcast again (a poor girl who called to survey me on my recent repair experience and definitely got an earful) and again asked to speak to a manager. So far, no callbacks. I can understand the occasional scheduling error, but I think that Comcast’s inability to figure out how to schedule an appointment four times in a row moves into the realm of “The Three Stooges Work the Dispatch Desk.”

:::whew::: Now I feel better. Thanks for letting me rant.

Jenna”

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