A California woman says she was just watching TV one night when her Comcast cable box suddenly exploded, followed by her TV shutting itself off, never to turn on again.

“It was like a firework going off,” she tells KGO-TV’s Michael Finney. “It startled me so much I came up out of my chair.”

As for her TV, she says, “No smoke, no lights blinking, no lights going off, just the TV flashed very brightly and went off and I could not get it to come back on.”

Her set-top fireworks happened at the same time as a cable outage in the customer’s area. A tech popped by a couple days later to hook her up with a new box, but could not do anything about replacing her mammoth paperweight of a TV.

The customer’s attempts to get Comcast to help her replace her TV proved fruitless, so she contacted Finney. He was at least able to get the company to admit that it couldn’t determine “if the surge was caused by the cable box or was caused by a typical power surge incident.”

Finney talked to a pair of independent TV repair services, who also said they could not determine the exact cause of the surge.

But, presumably seeing the value in positive publicity and in retaining a customer for the long-term, Comcast’s insurance folks sent the customer a check for $290, which she used to buy a new 40″ TV.

Says the customer, “I’m very pleased with a new TV because it’s much bigger than the one I’ve been watching the last two months.”

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