You have to love Comcast. We had a thunderstorm roll through, and our internet service and cable tv went down. Not a huge shocker; the thunder made the house shake. I called Comcast to report the outage - and that's when the fun started. I get their "technician" on the line, and he tells me:

"Our systems are being updated - could you call back after 6 AM?"

At which point I asked if they ran a 24x7 helpdesk, and he said they did. I told him no, they couldn't be 24x7 if they wanted to blow me off for 6 hours. At that point, I was put on hold, and when the guy came back, there was no talk of system updates - he took my account number, looked up my node, and told me that sure enough, the storm had taken us offline.

Why was that so hard? What I have to assume is that the helpdesk is being compensated based on how fast they "handle" calls. Blowing me off counts as "handling", so - if that tactic worked - I would have been off the line quickly, and by the time I got up in the morning, everything would probably be back up anyway.

However, that's not how I took it - and this post will be one more little straw in the growing pile of negative support stories floating around for Comcast.

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