Comcastic!

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.