Terminally Incoherent

Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently in Day 5 of the Comcastic Saga. If you remember my post from yesterday, I had major internet connectivity issues since Monday. I had a Comcast technician on site every single day of the week.

Was my problem resolved? No!

Do we know when the problem will be resolved? No!

Can comcast give us an estimate on when we can have our internet connection back up? No!

Here is the rundown of Day 5:

1. When I arrived in the office around 9:30 today the internet connection was up
2. It went down within 2 hours since my arrival
3. Comcast technician arrived around noon, and he swapped our RCA modem for a Motorola one. Why? No clue, but the connection picked up again
4. Guy leaves, connection drops 20 minutes later
5. I get on the phone with Comcast and ask them about that whole pole repair business (see yesterday’s post). The lady on the other side claims that the maintenance crew checked the pole, fixed it and closed the ticket. I explain to her that they didn’t fix anything because I’m still down.
6. After 5 minutes she decides to transfer me to the department that deals with the line maintenance. She patches me through to Atlanta unit. Funny thing cause I’m in NJ.
7. The Atlanta lady is rude as hell, and tells me to call 973-COMCAST to get to my local office. Funny thing - that number is not in service.
8. I call the tech support back, and they inform me that the work order on the pole was not closed at all. It is still active, and scheduled for today. WTF?
9. In short they said the work order is scheduled but they can’t tell me when they are going to come in and they can’t promises that it will be fixed today. All they can do is send in a technician on Wednesday between 3 and 5 pm. Other than that we just need to wait for the pole maintenance crew to do their job.
10. It is currently 5pm and the internet is still down.

Is it going to get fixed by Monday? I wouldn’t count on it. They might get around to it Thursday or Friday - but that’s a big gamble too. At this point I don’t even know if we will ever get our connection back.

Thankfully, a neighboring company allowed us to plug ourselves into their Verizon DSL. So we got a new IP address, changed the DNS records and we are currently up and running.

I think on Monday we will start looking into a new ISP. Comcast sucks.

Comcast is driving me nuts! My workplace has been having major connectivity issues for the past week and we still don’t know it the problems will be resolved any time soon.

Here is my story:

Day 1

1. Our internet connection goes down in the morning. I put in a call to Comcast and they promise to send someone in between 1 and 5pm.
2. Internet connectivity resumes around 4:30 when most of the staff already went home
3. Comcast technician shows up at 7pm. He is lucky as hell to get into the building - I did not plan staying late that day but I had to do some maintenance on the servers and got held up.
4. Since I don’t have keys to the room with the cable box, we reschedule the appointment for the next day between 10am and 1pm.
5. The technician helps himself to the snacks in our cafeteria fridge, and chills out on one of the chairs stuffing his face and reading a magazine. I tell the graveyard shift to keep an eye on him and leave home

Day 2

1. We loose internet connectivity around 9 am
2. Connection comes back around 3pm
3. Comcast technician shows up around 4pm
4. He checks the modems, and they are working fine. He checks out the cable box, and he gets perfect reading. He informs that everything is working fine, and that there is nothing more he can do.
5. He leaves.. We loose connection around 5:30 and it never comes back

Day 3

1. I’m out of the office but I find out that they have zero internet connection.
2. Someone puts in another call in and gets informed that there is a problem in our area, and a crew was already dispatched to fix it
3. Internet connectivity resumes around noon and stays up for the rest of the day

Day 4

1. 8:30 am - early birds hit the office and find themselves with no internet
2. They put in another call and a technician is scheduled to come in between 1 and 5
3. The technician arrives around 2pm
4. He looks at the modem, looks at the cable box then tells us that it must be something with the pole. He promises to put in a special work order, and send the maintenance crew to fix it.
5. He leaves. My boss throws a fit.
6. Around 4pm I call Comcast to see if they can tell me when the pole will get fixed. They have no clue what am I talking about.
7. After an hour on the phone I finally find out that the technicians usually put in these work orders at the end of their day when they come back to the local office (some guys do this at the end of their work week). These orders then get processed and picked up by another department which actually schedule the maintenance. This is done internally and there is no way I can get any estimate on when it can be done through tech support.
8. Since tech support has no record of the special work order ever taking place they schedule another technician for the next day between 10 and 3pm.

Day 5 is tomorrow. Is it going to get fixed? I don’t know. Comcast doesn’t know either. Maybe the maintenance crew will fix the pole situation. Maybe the lazy technician never scheduled that special work order. Maybe there is no problem on the pole.

No one knows anything, there is no plan and no solution in sight. What the hell are we paying for?

Fortunately the building has a T1 line coming. The neighboring office was nice enough to offer to plug us into that pipe until we can get our ISP crap worked out. Tomorrow we will have to reconfigure the firewall, and change the DNS records to point to a new IP… But at least we will be back online.

Comcast sucks.