tellhimfred.com

Comcast! OK, OK, I’ll admit it: writing about how much Comcast sucks is a played-out, hackneyed theme, and using a lolcats meme to usher it in is really fucking dumb, but it’s my soapbox.

About a month ago, the fiancee and I decided to upgrade our teev. We used to have two big 36-inch CRT lobstrosities when she moved into my old place in East Boston (we miss you, Jeveli’s - nobody has taken your place!) but along the way, the one that I owned died of natural causes. For the record, we got rid of it by taking it to an actual place to dispose of these things, as opposed to the usual East Boston way: put it on the curb, smash the tube open and fill it with dirty diapers.

So when we moved to the South End, we had but one TV to haul, this 36″ Phillips loadstone with a very noisy tube. After a while, it got so annoying that we started looking at flat-screens - plasmas and LCD. Before long, it was president’s day, and I managed to convince my fiancee that we couldn’t afford NOT to buy this one enormous plasma that was on sale. Still not sure how I pulled that off.

Getting the goddamn thing home was a story in and of itself. Salient points: Best Buy sucks hairy donkey balls, and we own a Honda Civic with a CD shuttle in the trunk. I ended up renting a Honda CRV Zipcar for a couple of hours to get the freakin’ thing home.

I had called Comcast a week or so prior, which proved an exercise in futility - they basically hang up on you if they don’t have enough capacity to deal with customers who have the poor taste to call from anything other than their home phone - I ended up on the Comcast “customer service chat”.

This is where some disembodied line of text gives you answers to your questions. Seemed okay at the time, but this is pretty much what happened.
ME: so all I need to do to hook my HDTV up to HD cable is get the proper cable? I don’t need a new box or anything?

SOME SHITHEAD UP IN CHELMSFORD: that’s right, sir.

Of course, this was (a) an outright lie, (b) evidence that outsourcing your customer service to Chelmsford leads to disaster, or (c) both (a) and (b). If you chose (c)…you probably have Comcast too. When I actually called from my home phone, I got a guy who gave it to me pretty straight. You need a new box, you’re gonna pay 15 bucks a month more for it, and that’s basically the size of it.

Fuckers. Of course if we want to avoid the $99.00 “installation fee” (some chooch shows up at your house with his pants falling off and switches out your box for you) we have to take the old box to a “local customer service center”. They don’t list the phone numbers for these places, they just give you an address, which is typically bogus. These places move around all the time, presumably to avoid being found by customers, and Comcast…Comcast doesn’t update their website.

I hate this fucking company. It’s this kind of shit that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was drafted to fight, but in the interests of keeping big business happy and the customer at the correct end of the rogering pole, modern jurisprudence seems to indicate that letting Comcast fuck who they want, when they want and how they want is in the best interests of everyone.

A big Fitzie GFY to the nice folks at Comcast, ladies and gentlemen. Ah well. We still have a big-ass plasma, Netflix, and a PS3 with the Blu-Ray. Some things you just can’t fuck up!

See you next time, Fredders.

PS - the movie “Wanted” was fucking mongoloid, yo. Even in hi-def.