Customer Service

So Walter, I hear you asking, how did you spend your lovely Monday afternoon?

Why, I was dealing with Comcast Customer Service, and it was the most pleasant thing in all the world.

To give you an idea of the utter pleasantness of the whole thing, I refer you to the letter below, which I wrote to Comcast when the whole thing was still fresh in my mind:

[letter begins]

I spent one hour and forty minutes online with a customer representative to discuss the fact that my Xbox 360 wouldn’t connect to the internet, while every other wifi device would.  Her training did not seem adequate to resolve my problem (which has, as it turns out, a very simple solution).  In the end, she turned off my modem so as to control it remotely, and said if I didn’t hear anything in four minutes, I was to call customer service.

I called customer service after four minutes, and was cut off.  I was cut off on the NINE SUBSEQUENT PHONE CALLS I PLACED.

Ladies and gentlemen, YOU ARE A PHONE COMPANY.  BY NOW YOU SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO KEEP SOMEONE ON HOLD WITHOUT CUTTING THEM OFF.

I now had a modem that was in bridge mode, and NONE OF MY DEVICES COULD CONNECT TO THE INTERNET.

I noodled around on your gateway,  and after an hour resolved all the problems myself.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOU ARE AN INTERNET COMPANY.  YOU’VE HAD TEN YEARS TO FIGURE OUT A WAY TO CONNECT AN XBOX 360 TO YOUR MODEMS, AND YOU’VE NEVER WORKED IT OUT.

You are imbeciles.  Your company is an embarrassing dinosaur, and I can only hope that a competitor fit to live in the 21st century burns it to the ground so I can dance on the  ashes.

Yours sincerely,

etc. etc.