Comcast, why is your scheduling system made out of peanut-butter and bits of baling wire?

After the abominable wait on hold, I get a human to find out why the tech has not arrived. The CSR then drops the bomb on me. There is no appointment for a digital upgrade with DVR scheduled for my account!

Add another log on the interminable blaze of Comcast ineptitude, after the jump…

Andy writes:

“Right around Christmas last year, I decided that in lieu of anything else from my S.O., I would like to upgrade our cable to take advantage of my HD-TV. We already had a cable modem and the very basic (13 channel) cable TV. This was in essence an upgrade, costing 20 dollars more for digital and HD content, as well as 15 dollars for a compatible DVR. As the holidays were coming up, I tried to make the appointment before we would be gone to visit family, but no luck. The only appointment I could get was the first week in January. No, I could not install it myself, no picking up the box, the upgrade required a tech to come out (with a minimum fee of 34.95 for a service call) Not great, but what can you do? Anyway, after getting off the phone with my 3-week-later appointment, I went to do some work on the internet. Within five minutes of surfing, the connection went down. Now, I haven’t had many problems with my service since moving from downtown Atlanta to Decatur, but I thought nothing of it at the time. It was getting late anyway, so I went to bed, expecting whatever trouble was occurring would be fixed by the morning. Well, sure enough, not only was my internet still disabled, but I was getting a very strange error telling me that if I wished to connect to the internet I needed to subscribe to Comcast’s broadband service. This worried me so I went through the 1 hour wait time to talk to a CSR (the wait time was even longer the night before when I was trying to upgrade my service). I informed the CSR of my problem connecting, and was informed that I was not listed as having a broadband account, or even very basic cable. The only service I had listed was the digital cable that was to be installed next month! It was then I realized that whoever it was that set up my upgrade had somehow cancelled all the other services I already had. I explained to the CSR what I thought had happened, and he very nicely said he would take care of it. A couple of hours later, I was back online and everything was fine. For a while…

Fast-forward to the day of my appointment for my upgrade 3 weeks later. The appointment was from 8-11 am, so I let work know that I would be an hour or two late (I don’t go in til 10). I get up bright and early and started waiting. At 10:30, I get on the horn to Comcast to find out what is going on. After the abominable wait on hold, I get a human to find out why the tech has not arrived. The CSR then drops the bomb on me. There is no appointment for a digital upgrade with DVR scheduled for my account! I ask how this is so, and the rep tells me after looking into it, that only one work-order can be open at any time and when my service was turned off and I called to get it fixed, they had closed my pending work-order for the upgrade and it had never been re-opened. So, ever helpful the CSR asked if I would like to schedule another appointment. Angry, I said yes, but asked how they were going make this gross mistake up to me. The answer was nothing. I persisted and finally got them to waive the $34.99 installation fee. Then I set up another appointment: 3 weeks from the time of my original one. This appointment worked out fine, but man is my butt still chapped about that one. I would have given up my cable, internet and everything but the only other option is Bellsouth, which I had previously sworn to never give another red cent after an even worse experience.”

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