God spare me....

... from organizations like Comcast! I was beyond pissed. Livid might more aptly describe my sentiments earlier today. I've calmed down to a low simmer sufficiently enough to write about my tale of woe.

So, yesterday my TV and computer connection abruptly died at about 4:45 pm. Kind of tilts my annoyance meter. We place a call to Comcast and talk to two different people. An Internet tech type and some TV chickadee who doesn't know shit from Shinola. The tech dude checks whatever they check there at the local office and says "you've got no signal coming in to your modem." No, really? You think?? Then he passes us off to the TV people cuz he can't do anything until they get the TV signal going. Oooookay. Still mildly "grrrrr-like" annoyed.

Since they haven't had any other calls (of course we're the "only ones" who are out) the above- mentioned TV chickadee categorizes it as a trouble call and says "we'll have someone out tomorrow between 2 and 5." In other words, too bad, so sad, thanks, have a nice day! Now I'm starting to get pissed.

So today a techie guy comes out, and after much back and forth and to and fro to the outside box, informs me we have an outage on the whole block. Duh-huh! We told you that yesterday, you putzes!!! And, of course, he can't fix it cuz he's a "trouble call" guy, not an "outage" guy! There's only one outage guy working today and he's over at Lake Linganore and won't be able to come over here until ... blah, blah, blah. Wait, wait ... it gets sooooo much better!

So, finally the outage guy shows up and does whatever they do to get things working again. Shortly thereafter I get a call from the first trouble call guy asking if we have our service back. Uh, that would a NO - I got zippity-do-dah here. Hmmmmm, sez he, that's strange.

After much confusion on their part, and a whole lot of toe-tapping on my part, we finally found out what happened. Seems one of their contractors was hooking up a new customer (our neighbor across the street) yesterday. He dug a trench from the cable connector box, across the common area into my yard, then under the street and across the neighbor's yard to his house. All of which no one - including us - knew about! Then, after he knocked everyone off, the jerk went home and left it like that. Didn't tell a soul! Lew pointed out to the outage dude that a trench had been dug! The right hand of Comcast had not a clue what the left hand was doing. So now I'm getting to the "beyond pissed" stage here.

Trying to figure it out

New (neighbors) and cut (everyone else!) cable

A courtesy call might have been the expedient thing to do, yes? Why? Because in the process of their trench digging that they failed to let me know about as they dug across my yard in their arrogant supposition that they own the right of way and everything beneath it, they ruptured our underground sprinkler system! Morons of the universe! This is where my lividness shot off the chart. And I thought Adelphia was bad. They had nothing on these monumentally incompetent Comcast folks! So, we now have the name of someone in charge of Customer Service in Philadelphia. They'll be getting a repair bill.

And this, my friends, is what they call progress.