Why I Hate Comcast

By Brett Stewart

    It’s no secret Comcast is among the most hated companies in the world. In 2010, The Consumerist even voted it the “Worst Company in America.” Having had many hours of personal experience with this horrid company, I’d like to share my two cents on why exactly Comcast is the worst.

    For about two weeks now, every few hours my internet shuts down for a half hour or so, and it always shuts down at the worst possible times. When I call Comcast, I get directed to a voice message that says, “Hello, we are experiencing an outage at your address. We are aware of the issue and technicians will fix the issue in the next four hours. There is no need to call again, press one for a return call when this problem has been fixed.” Here’s what this message says to me as the consumer, “Yeah, we know your internet is down. We don’t really care, so please stop calling us.”

    After listening to this message half a dozen times this week, I called Comcast to schedule an appointment for them to come out and fix the issue. Having clearly scheduled the appointment on Saturday, Comcast of course, showed up on Sunday. The clearly incompetent repair man then asked me questions like, “So, uh, what does your box do when your offline?” He then tells us the service in our area is from a cable running 200 feet down the line of houses I live in, and their solution is to replace this cable with a new one. Of course, this cable is a few days away, so they reset my box, forcing me to go through their annoying process of installing their bloatware onto my computer in order to get back on the internet, which is still crashing like clockwork, by the way.

    Upon calling Comcast about the issue, I get connected to an outsourced call center where someone who’s name is obviously not  “John” insists on telling me there is no problem that he is aware of. Keep in mind that being an outsourced call, I had to ask him to repeat things a multitude of times, and he almost accidentally signed me up for HBO. Finally, he tells me to check the outage information on Comcast.net.

....Really?

If Comcast didn’t monopolize my entire area, I would switch to anything in a heartbeat. I’m fairly certain using dial-up would be more reliable method of checking my emails than using Comcast, and I’m talking about the 1996 dial-up, the kind of dial-up where you get a complementary modem that sets on fire after a week and you have to triangulate six different phone numbers to your position to get it to work, so it comes with a map and a compass. That’s better than Comcast.

Now I just have to wait for my internet to come back online so I can post this.