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I Love Calling Comcast
Today, for the third time in a week, I came home and my son told me the “Internet is down.” I checked and just like all the other times, I actually could ping the Comcast gateway and so I knew the Internet wasn’t “down.” What’s actually going on, however, is that the DNS isn’t working for some reason. For the third time I called Comcast. Not so much because I have to, but because I like to. They’re actually fairly helpful (if pedantic) and polite. Besides I still have 50,000 shares of ATHOME stock for which I need to get my money’s worth somehow.
It turns out that they solve the problem, but I still haven’t figured out why what we do solves the problem since we’ve done something different each time I called. The lesson for enterprise computing is that while Comcast’s customer support is fulfilling the mission of getting me back online, they’re not solving the real problem and so they keep getting called. They never get to the point where they discover I can ping their gateway. Another interesting fact, they don’t seem to know I called just a few days ago. If they do, they’re playing dumb. That’s cool, because so am I. :-)
Posted by windley on April 4, 2005 5:25 PM




Comment from Kelly Hall at April 4, 2005 11:59 PM
1) Phone bank people in faraway lands reading canned scripts are cheaper than network engineers. Or so it appears to University of Phoenix MBA grads and the wizards at SBC who amazed me by making PacBell service seem good in comparison.
2) I take my AtHome stock certificate with me to job interviews for the little meeting about compensation. It has gained me far more money in direct salary than it ever was worth as stock. It is usually a great conversation piece with the engineers and shuts up the HR people who want to low ball my base pay and make up for it in worthless options. "You want me to take worthless options? Heck, I've got worthless STOCK."