This story has very little do with their actual Internet service (which is not very good to begin with: huge huge latency and bandwidth issues at certain points in the day), but instead their customer service.

I noticed a recent hike in my monthly Internet bill. I knew that my introductory pricing plan was up, and I knew that I would be paying the full price. I called in and found out that since Insight, my old Internet provider, was bought out by Comcast, that their old monthly prices were null and void. Now I had to pay the new Comcast rate of $60.

So the customer service rep comes up with a great idea: Why not add basic cable for $10 and reduce the Internet bill to $43? This came to me as a surprise, and made me ask her why would anyone go for the now full price of $60 for users of only the Internet service? She mumbled some reason about some people wanting to have different cable service, but that still didn’t make any sense. I decided to not push any further.

So I said, fine. I’ll pay the $53 (~$55 including tax, hooray for $5 of savings). I then asked if there was there any way to reduce this month’s bill to the previous rate, seeing how I was not notified of this change in rate from Insight’s normal rate to Comcast’s. So she graciously waives the $44 installation fee. Wait, what? You were going to charge me an installation fee? For what?

All you have to do on your end is change the numbers on my billing statement. I guess not, because it gets even better.

She then asks me for an appointment time to come and install the cable. I tell her, no one watches TV here. In fact, there is no TV in the apartment. We go back and forth a couple times, me telling her that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to come out because nothing is going to change physically in the apartment on our end. Then she puts me on hold to go and figure this out.

She comes back, saying that I would have to pay the full $60 if I didn’t have a TV.

blink blink. What?

So I said screw it, and made an appointment to install tomorrow. Without having a TV. I’m probably going to have to find a TV if the technician is really picky, but instead, I’m hoping to sweet talk him into not doing jack squat to the apartment. There goes 2 hours of my life waiting for a service that I don’t need or want, which is paid for by the company providing the service. Yippee.

This entire situation is just so mind-bogglingly retarded, I had to put it to blog form and share it. Maybe I can tweet it @ComcastCares and see if they really care.