Once upon a time, phone customer service was a luxury and online chat service was a thing for science fiction. But sometimes, it pays off to just drive (or walk, bike, skate, skulk from rooftop to rooftop) to your local Comcast office when the folks on the phone just can’t help you.

The writers over at BestMoviesEverNews.com recently discovered this when they were having issues with their Comcast service.

“Ours was a very simple issue that had been fixed several times over the years, but this week, 8 of our writers had the exact same problem,” reads the blog post, which is also a story of one man’s awakening to the reasons why so many people hate Comcast. “In the past we’d call and get the local Customer Service and literally within 2 – 5 minutes, the issue would be fixed.”

But with this latest issue, all of their calls were being routed to call centers in the Philippines.

“I have no issue with talking to someone in another country, but when they have no clue of what to do, then I have a major problem,” writes BestMoviesEver. “Especially since our bill for Comcast each month is very high for 8 people and you do expect reasonably good service. This tech kept telling me we had to set up service calls, and when I explained that we only needed to have a signal sent to each of the boxes, he said they couldn’t do that. They could only set up service calls.”

Calls by all eight of the writers, located in various places around the country, all resulted in the same problem; rather than simply sending a signal to the customers’ modem — a solution that had fixed the problem in the past — they were each being told that a service call was needed.

The writer of the blog post says he was told that there were no tech people readily available to speak to over the phone. He said he was willing to wait but that the phone rep told him Comcast places an importance on getting customers off the phone quickly so he couldn’t be put on hold to wait for an available tech.

Finally, a solution dawned on him:

After 6 hours of this silliness, I drove over to the local office just to have them send a signal to our cable box. Sounds crazy, but that was the only way to fix the issue. The Support person there had obviously heard this same complaint hundreds of times as they said “You gotta love Comcast.” The person (who understandably wanted to remain anonymous) said that customers were going to see this continually happening as part of the ‘shrink’ that Comcast is currently doing. They said that right now they were working on a center in Denver, but all the calls were being sent overseas even though they are more than aware of customer dissatisfaction.

I asked the person if the years of customer complaints about service would ever be dealt with, they said it wasn’t going to be likely.

Each of the site’s staffers had to go over to their local Comcast office to get their issue resolved. Yes, it’s a pain — but significantly less painful than having to schedule a service call and having to work out of a Starbucks or library in the interim.

Unfortunately, visiting the local Comcast office will not solve all your issues. But you’d be surprised at what you can actually get resolved in person. It’s harder for irritated customers to lose their temper — or for employees to act dismissively — when you’re face to face and can have an honest, human chat about the issue. And even if that employee needs to call up someone at a Comcast call center to deal with things, at least the employee and the CSR on the phone will know all the correct terms and have all the information at their disposal.

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