It’s been a whilessince I’ve had a good Comcast bashing post.  Here we go again.

Over the past few days my XFINITY(!!!!) digital voice service has been routinely dropping calls.  It starts with the person on the other end of the phone unable to hear me, then a few seconds later the call is dropped totally.  Eventually I was sitting next to the modem when this happened, and saw that it was rebooting after the calls were dropped.

Last night, after it happened several more times, I called Comcast’s customer support line.  The guy on the other end of the phone did some useless troubleshooting which was unrelated to my issue, then told (rudely, of course) me “there’s only so much he can do over the phone” and that he’d have to send a tech out.  He started the scheduling process.

(As a quick aside, I love instructing support techs on how to do their jobs.  He asks me “when was the last time this happened?”  I replied “doesn’t your system log that type of activity?”  “No. I can see your modem uptime though.”  “Why don’t you look at that then?” “Oh, it looks like the modem rebooted itself about 9 minutes ago.”  “That would be your answer.”)

Then, predictably, the phone went dead, and the modem rebooted itself.

After waiting about 20 minutes, thinking the tech would be smart enough to call me back since he had my info pulled up, I called back.  I explained what happened, and we got to go through a different set of phone troubleshooting that was unrelated to my issue.  To her credit, though, the second woman (at my prompting, naturally) did take herself out of the call queue so that she could call me back in the inevitable situation that the phone disconnected.  The phone held though, and she scheduled me an appointment for today (yesterday’s tomorrow) between 3 and 5 PM.

So of course today, I get an automated phone call reminding me of my appointment tomorrow between 3 and 5.  (I guess she got the time right, but not the date, so half credit, I suppose.)  That message said if there was any issue with my appointment time, I was to call back a different Comcast call center.  I did.

I told the guy who answered the phone my appointment was for today, not tomorrow.  He proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions, in yet another unsuccessful attempt to troubleshoot by phone.  Eventually he got around to telling me that he didn’t have access to change the appointment, so I needed to call 1-800-COMCAST again and ask to speak to the local dispatch office.

So I called 1-800-COMCAST again, and ended up in IVR hell, as I tried to explain to the automated voice lady that I needed to speak to the local dispatch office.  “I didn’t get that.  Please repeat your request again.”

Eventually I got to a live person, who confirmed my Friday appointment (grrrr…) and then told me that they didn’t have the authority to contact dispatch, so they’d have to call me back after speaking to their supervisor.

About 15 minutes another guy called me back and said the tech will be at my home between now and 5 PM today.  But give him until 5:15 before you call back to complain.

He has 3 hours and 7 minutes to show up.  We’ll see.