I state all of the following under penalty of perjury.
My recent relations with Comcast (I have been a customer for over two decades) began in mid-July when I started to upgrade my system to its Triple Play.
There followed a series of instances of gross operational mismanagement, negligence and incompetence, summarized as follows: 15-20 site visits to finish the job; leaving my home open to being burglarized for over one week; failure to issue an account credit for repeat visits/no-shows; erroneous set-up causing frequent inability to connect/stay connected to the network; contradictory information from Comcast; loss of existing cable signal; inability to locate the main cable.
Yelp space limitations prevent me from providing full details on the above; feel free to email me at mmyesq@gmail.com for the full details.
I brought all of the above, first phase of our problems to the attention of Comcast and was contacted by a representative of its Executive Customer Relations. He investigated my claims with his colleagues and did not find anything contradictory with anything whatsoever described to Comcast in the full detail version.
Just the worst aspect of our 5-month ordeal is detailed immediately below.
When it rained, our phone line went dead. Comcast sent representatives for 6-8 visits over a 2-3 week period to correct the phone situation. The routine was: a Comcast representative would come, get the phone line up and running, but it then failed a few hours later or the next time it rained.
This situation represented a tragedy waiting to happen for two distinct situations: while the phone line was down, we could not receive phone calls, nor was our burglar alarm functioning.
My wife's parents are in their mid-nineties with highly limited communications abilities. They are dependent on her for many basic elements of life, including medicine, food purchasing, local errands (bank, governmental, etc.), doctors' appointments, etc. For the 2-3 weeks, we were forced to constantly call in to our home line to see if there were any phone messages, in general, but specifically from my in-laws. We told Comcast about this situation during their first or second phone-related visit.
In fact, during this period, my father-in-law fell and could not get up. Eventually, he mustered all his energy and with the help of his wife, crawled/was dragged to a bench where he managed to prop himself up. It is unclear whether or not he or his wife tried to call us.
While the phone lines were down, we were also disconnected from our burglar alarm. Thus, for much of a 3-week period, if our house was broken into, the burglar alarm company and the police would not have been notified. There was one weekend when my wife and I had planned to go away, but we had to cancel our plans.
On two occasions, Comcast made appointments purely on its own for visits to fix the phone and notified us about the appointments on our non-working phone line!! Comcast had several alternative phone numbers for my wife and me.
At one point, there were four (4) Comcast representatives inside our home at the same time. Early on, I had suggested to Comcast a partial or complete rewiring to in all ways disassociate the Comcast line from the older AT&T equipment, but this was not undertaken, then only, successfully, at the very last visit.
My wife and I canceled numerous plans and commitments out of concern about a nonfunctioning burglar alarm and have lost huge amounts of earnings. Every email, every phone call (often with unacceptable wait times, including to ADT), every onsite visit took chunks of our time. My wife and I have lost thousands of dollars in income. Our customer/client relationships have, of course, suffered, although this is not easily measurable.
This situation was also the source of a wide variety of additional direct and indirect out-of-pocket costs, including gas/wear and tear on our cars to come home for repeated service calls, added home heating costs, increased cell phone usage, dirtied carpeting, requiring cleaning
(Comcast technicians are supposed to wear booties but they were not always worn; we never wear shoes on carpets).
We paid for Comcast services (Internet and phone) while they were not being provided and paid for burglar alarm monitoring while a non-functioning phone line prevented our home from being monitored. In the middle of our phone outages, with no resolution in sight, and out of desperation, I bought an entirely new cordless phone system, thinking that there might be some issue with our previous, older cordless system.
This whole situation has been the source of huge stress, almost all of it avoidable. This was at its worst with the virtually continuous telephone outages. The conflicting AT&T lines/system could and should have been diagnosed and removed/fully deactivated, if not during the very first Comcast visit last summer, then when our phone system first stopped read more
