ask-mark.com

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t posted much in a while. Besides my having problems installing Windows on my home computer, I’ve been fighting my web server at work and my Comcast internet connection was down from Sunday evening until earlier today. The best part of my internet connection problem is that an e-mail response sent to me by Comcast told me to join them in a live chat if my internet connection could not be fixed after following their troubleshooting directions. Of course, their directions were simply a paraphrasing of the troubleshooting I told them I had already performed before contacting them. Then to top it all off, I entered a chat with a support "analyst" named Rain, where I was sent multiple copy-and-pasted responses to my questions:

Rain> Thank you for contacting Comcast. My name is Rain. How may I assist you today? Mark > I cannot get my internet connection at home to work. Mark > I am at work now, so I will not be able to do any troubleshooting of the connection. Rain > Thank you Mark. I understand the frustration that you are experiencing with your connection. We can get that taken care of immediately. Rain > In order to troubleshoot your connection you will need to be beside your computer. Please call 1-800-COMCAST when you are at your computer and we will be happy to help. Rain > Is there anything else that I can help you with today?

This is about where I lost it. In the e-mail I received, I am invited to enter a live chat with Comcast to solve my connection problem. This, of course, can’t happen unless I’ve got an internet connection. In my frustration, I get desperate for help:

Mark > but, I work in IT Mark > I have tried all of the troubleshooting methods that were e-mailed to me Mark > whoever replied to my e-mail said, "I understand you are having issues with your Internet connection. We currently do not show any outages in your area affecting connectivity. Just to make sure, I ran a couple of tests from here to your modem, and did not get any slow or missing responses. Slow or missing responses would need to be present to indicate a connectivity issue" Mark > I don’t know how he connected to my modem, because I cannot get a connection. Rain > In order to troubleshoot your connection you will need to be beside your computer. Please call 1-800-COMCAST when you are at your computer and we will be happy to help. Mark > ok

That’s when I lost it and just exited the chat. Rain is lucky I came home with an active internet connection tonight, otherwise I’d be raining hell and fire on Comcast right now. I suppose this post on how Comcast’s tech support is horrid will do. So, to re-emphasize my point, don’t bother with Comcast tech support because they are generally of little help. Comcast tech support does not even bother to read what is sent to them about a user’s problem, hastily replying with some generic response that was probably found in some repository of answers.