Stephen Yeargin

Last Friday, Samantha and I came home after a cruise around the northern suburbs to find our cable television and Internet out. I had in fact paid the bill on time (early, in fact), so I came to the conclusion that the error message on the screen was just the product of a minor glitch in the system. A few rough storms had come through a couple of days before, so we guessed that our friendly neighborhood Comcast guy was simply replacing some faulty equipment. We called the toll-free number to report the problem.

The woman on the other end of the line said that there were no reported outages in our area, so it must be an issue with our box. She told me to wait fifteen minutes and to call back if it still had not come back on. In the meantime, she went ahead and scheduled a follow-up visit from a technician on Tuesday. After the allotted amount of time, I did just that. Realizing that this did not bode well, I call back. This time, I was told that there was an outage in my area and that they were working to restore service. I took a bit of comfort in this and headed on to bed, convinced that they would have whatever issue there was resolved by the morning.

I woke up and turned on the television. Same message.

I called again and the operator makes note that we already have a technician scheduled to come out to look at the line. I agreed, but again asked if there was any chance that it was something else entirely, as it seemed to be receiving a digital signal, but no video. At this point, we were told again that there is not an outage. If you cannot sense the irony in that statement, you are not likely to understand the next part.

Frustrated, I call the leasing office for our apartment complex to see if anyone else had lost service. The assistant manager left a message with her contact with Comcast, the local sales rep that connects every resident. Around noon, we see a Comcast contractor’s truck pull up. A young guy downstairs rushes out to meet him, obviously as exasperated as we are. From our balcony, we can clearly hear that he too was told, “There is not an outage in your area,” and that he had called several times before with no luck. Samantha yells down that we are having problems as well. “See?!” our neighbor says, pointing toward our balcony. The technician goes on to work.

At this point, we are positive that everything is in good hands. About thirty minutes later, we hear the truck leave and then come back. Our service is still out at this point, so we figure it must be serious. We head out of the apartment (if you know anything about us, you know that we become stir crazy without a connection to the outside world). I must have reset the wireless router twenty times before this point, “just to make sure” that it was not about to suddenly spring back to life. We call again to inquire as to if we will be receiving credit for the day’s outage; Charter, our service in Martin, would toss that to you at the first sign of irritation. The operator would neither confirm or deny if that was going to happen, only saying that she would “email [her] supervisor” about our problem. As if reading from a script, we are again told, “There is not an outage.” I disagreed. Her next script was to offer their Digital Voice phone service. “If I had that, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. It would be out too.” I think I might have heard a “have a nice day” out of her after that comment.

When we get back, the Comcast van is gone. Our service is still out and we have reached a point of inconsolable irritation at the cable company. Either he fixed that guy’s issue and left us hanging – we know we asked for help more than he did – or the issue could not be fixed during his work day. I called AT&T for a quote on DSL service. Not particularly happy with them from a few days prior for making sales calls for this service, I was not exactly thrilled to be rewarding bad behavior. Liking the special, I went ahead and made arrangements for our line to be provisioned for DSL (the process of enabling the service) for Tuesday.

Sunday comes. No Internet. No television. I stop feeling guilty about signing up for another service, wagering that if we had DSL, at least only one of the services would be out. It is now 9 p.m. on Monday and we are still without service. I missed the hockey game. We had to take Samantha’s work-provided 17″ MacBook Pro to Panera Bread (free wi-fi) to make sure that we didn’t miss anything important. There are certainly greater tragedies and far more suffering in the world around us, but I am still in disbelief at how a company can expect to keep its customers when their service is inaccessible for five straight days.

To add further insult to injury, today’s scheduled appointment was botched because, while the operator assured me that the technician would be at our apartment “around 6 p.m.”, I checked my voice mail after work to find out that he was at our apartment at 4:10 this afternoon, when nobody was around for him. Sounding irritated, he said that he was “going to have to cancel this service call” and that I would have to reschedule. By the time I walked through the door of our apartment, I had canceled Internet service and Samantha had managed to get our account credited for the five days we’ve been without service (apparently we both called at the same time) and pick up the DSL box from AT&T (formerly BellSouth).

After a bit of the usual debugging, we’re now happily Internet-ing. The cable is still out. Being the kind souls we are, we went ahead and moved forward with having the technician come out and fix that after the holidays. We will be his last stop of the evening on Friday.

I am now a supporter of the idea to change state laws to allow for more open competition for television and Internet service. Our apartment faces north, so we either use Comcast or go without (antenna broadcast channels will fall silent in 2009). I harbor a fair amount disdain for the little punk that stars in the industry propaganda that says “Cable helped me in school and gave my daddy a job.” Protected monopolies do nothing for their community other than line the wallets of the politicians that fight to keep them the only show in town. Judging by this weekend and by how aggressively they are fighting the coming legislation for increasing competition, they have a lot to lose in an open marketplace.