Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

I see that those assholes are beefing with ABC, as the local channel is asking viewers to call ComBastards and tell them not to cut ABC.

I don't know what the problem is, but I'm wagering that it's Comcast's doing.

Because Comcast sucks, and they hate their customers.

Comcast has been offering its standard customers a "free upgrade" to its X1 service for those who use its standard service.

But you know that Comcast is expert at fucking over its customers, right? This is how they do it: Their standard customers have a Comcast-supplied DVR that is pretty much a ten-year-old piece of shit. They break down frequently and Comcast's remedy is to give people another "refurbished" DVR. But even though they're POSs, when they work, they record up to two shows at a time.

The box that Comcast is giving out as part of its X1 promotion records nothing at all. If you want a box that'll record stuff, then you're going to pay more. So Comcast's "free upgrade", in practical effect, is a lesser amount of service because, ever since the first VCRs went on sale, people have gotten away from appointment television. Comcast wants you to go back to that and if you would rather record and watch later, this "free upgrade" to X1 service will cost you even more.

The CATV companies had best get a clue. They're making it more and more advantageous to people to go with watching their shows over the Internet.

..... Comcast. Which is no surprise to anyone who has them as a cable/ISP provider. Comcast has gotten so large and so evil that over-the-air TV is enjoying a resurgence. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Fire TV are growing because Comcast and the other cable providers suck so badly.

A friend's Comcast box stopped working. They gave her another one, which didn't run right. See, for Comcast, their "cable boxes" are also cheap-ass DVRs, which Comcast keeps "refurbishing". ("Refurbishing", to Comcast, is putting fresh batteries into the remote. Sometimes, they don't even bother to wipe the drives, so you can get a random selection of somebody else's recordings.) The Comcast cable boxes are old pieces of crap from Cisco or Scientific Atlanta that have been out of production for several years.

You'd think that just swapping out a box would be no big deal, right? Not to Comcrap, which crammed $50 onto her bill. It wasn't for service, because Comcast customers now have to do their own equipment installations.

Comcast is so large, now, that they really don't give a shit about residential customers.

Comcast has, apparently, gotten so large that they don't give a shit if all they can give you for a DVR is six-year old pieces of shit.

They're supposedly "refurbished", which is a code for "just shrink-wrap it and give them a remote".

A friend of mine is on her fourth unit in two weeks. Two of them won't "provision", which is their term for being recognized by Comcast's system.

Comcast makes going to an OTA antenna look better each day....

They're probably feeling the cold breath of Death as you read this:

A federal appeals court has struck down Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from restricting access to legal Web content.

I know a number of people who have kept their broadband service but have dumped their cable TV service. If it is now legal for ISPs to restrict traffic, I bet that the very first thing they will do is crack down on Netflix, and then, Hulu Plus.

Between Netflix and Hulu, you'd pay about $16 per month to have access to damn near everything that's on TV. That's opposed to the $70-$100+ you'd pay your cable provider for access to the same channels.

So while Comcast, Verizon, Charter, Time-Warner, AT&T and all of the rest might promise that they won't restrict what you can download, you can bet your next paycheck that within 30 minutes of the ruling coming down, they were working on (or dusting off) their plans to do just that.

I got off the phone a little bit ago with my friend, whose experiences with Comcast's customer service sparked this post. She was called this morning by some nice guy named Roger. He had her do some stuff to the DVR itself involving accessing some deep-seated features. it didn't work the first two times she tried it, but it did on the third time. Now everything is good.

A few things came out in the call.

First, none of the customer service clowns that she spoke to yesterday documented the calls. Roger told her that Comcast is going to look into that, as the customer service people are supposed to document each call so that the company can tell when there is a real problem with a customer. I know that is supposed to be done, for they certainly do it for their business class customers.*

Second, none of the support people yesterday knew anything about adjusting the internals of the DVR, even though the model of the DVR was always brought to their attention. They were all stuck on the "it must be your TV" script. It would seem to me that Comcast has a training issue.

Third, both she and I believe that Roger the Expert would not have called her if I hadn't blasted Comcast here and if Comcast wasn't paying attention to the blogs. I passed the e-mail address for the "Comcast Cares" people to her, she wrote them last night and voila! problem solved.

It should not take a blogger railing at Comcast to fix a problem that, in retrospect, should have been high on the list of the troubleshooting tree for the tech rep on the phone: "Problem: Picture does not display correctly with new DVR. Customer reports picture was correct for older DVR. Customer reports that HD TV is set for 16:9 picture." The obvious choice should be that maybe the fucking DVR needs to be set up. But Comcast didn't provide any printed documentation on how to do that** and it took five different customer service people and over four hours on the phone over two days for her to get it fixed.

Comcast has a problem with their customer service. They should fix it.

________________________________
* It's not uncommon for Comcast "business class" customers to have just Internet service for $50 a month and yet they get far better customer support than a residential customer who may have $200 a month in services. Go figure that one out.
** My friend is not a techno-geek by any stretch of the imagination.

A friend of mine has a boatload of Comcast: Triple play, HD service, with some pay channels. her DVR box, an Explorer 8100 began skipping on playback. They gave her a new one (or new to her) Explorer 8300.

The box has been refreshed, repowered and still this: A lot of the HD channels appear in 4:3, not 16:9. The TV is a 16:9 HD one. Nothing's been changed. But the damn HD channels are not presenting all of the time in 16:9.

Four calls to customer service. First guy tried to refresh it. Second rep, a woman, dumped the call to Spanish language, and the person there couldn't speak English (which is no real surprise). The third guy couldn't help at all (and he was barely comprehensible). She's now on the phone to the fourth guy to get someone to come out.

What the fuck? Why is it so hard to get an answer from these asswipes? Do they specialize in non-support support calls?

She's going to switch service in short order if those jagoffs can't fix it for her.

See, there is this outfit called Real Grrls, which teaches young girls how to make movies, videos and animations. One of the staffers at Reel Grrls tweeted this about FCC Commissioner Baker voting for the NBC-Comcast merger and then going to work for Comcast:

OMG! @FCC Commissioner Baker voted 2 approve Comcast/NBC merger & is now lving FCC for A JOB AT COMCAST?!?

Well, that didn't go over too well with one of the muckety-mucks at ComBastards, because they were going to give Reel Grrls $18,000. So some vice preznit at Comcast wrote them a pissy letter and wrote, in essence: "You are being so mean to us! You hurt our feelings! We're not going to give you a donation, so there!!"

Of course, news of that bitchy letter got out, circling the Internet and now making its way into print. And since punishing a bunch of young girls makes Comcast look like a bunch of abject douchebags, they are trying to walk that letter back.

I'd call Comcast "a bunch of evil swine", except that I'd probably be sued for defamation by the Evil Swine Association.

(H/T)

This will probably be the new cable lineup:

Basic cable:
2- Your local NBC affiliate.
3- The next local NBC affiliate.
4- MSNBC
5- CNBC
6- CNBC World
7- ShopNBC
8- USA
9- SyFy
10- Telemundo
11- Weather Channel
12- Bravo
13- Chiller
14- A&E
15- Sleuth
16- History Channel
17- History Channel International,
18- Biography Channel
19- National Geographic International
20- Lifetime
21- E!
22- Golf Channel

Extra channels:
23-150- Lots of bullshit channels, including CNN

Premium channels:
151-157- HBO
158- Starz
159- Showtime
160-200 Sports and porn

Channels that you have to ask for and make repeated calls in order to get:
201- Your local ABC affiliate
202- Your local CBS affiliate
203- Your local Fox affiliate
204- PBS
205- F/X
206- Fox News
207- Fox Movie Channel
208- TNT
209- Turner Classic Movie Channel

Why, you might wonder?

Because Comcast is buying NBC and the first 21 channels are owned by either Comcast or NBC.

Can you stop with testing the Emergency Broadcast system in frelling prime time?

What is the point, other than to further piss off your viewers? If you want to make sure the frakking thing works, then why not test it at 4 AM, when about all that is running is soft porn and infomercials?

..... I will just smash my thumb with a hammer.

I thought I was done yesterday. But then a couple of hours ago, the Dude in the Brown Uniform delivered the cable modem that wasn't supposed to be overnighted to me because it wouldn't have arrived until tomorrow.

Back on the phone to Comcast. I have called Comcast enough over the last two days that I don't let the automatic routing program get two syllables out before I choose the option. The first time, the call went dead. The second time, when it put me to a service representative, it gave me the triple trouble tone and said "you must first dial a 1 and then the area code to make a call. Fairpoint Communications." and hung up.

Third time around, I got to talk to somebody. 20 minutes later (including waiting because Comcast's computer system crashed), an appointment was made so that a cable guy will to come by and pick up the damned UPS box, because I'm sure as hell not going to take it to the Comcast place (which is not nearby). They can't send me a USPS return box or even a return label, well, they just can't, that's all.

I know, Verizon's DSL would be a lot slower and cost as much, if not more. But damn, could they have been any more fucked up?

(The story so far.)

I called the folks at Comcast and asked: "Dude, where is my frakking self-install kit?" After a lot of time on hold, the answer was: "Um, we never sent it. We can overnight it to you, no charge, but it won't go out to tomorrow."

Bzzt! No good. So the deal was that I'd pry my recumbent ass from the couch and go to the local Comcast place and get one. In return, they'd give me a bribe credit to make me not as pissed off at them.

So I get the thing. It wouldn't install the software needed to unlock the modem. According to the installation software, for a Winders OS, it has to be Windows 98, ME, `00, XP, Vista or 7, and what it thinks I have is Windows NT6.1.

Which, in case you don't know, is another name for Windows 7.

So I called Comcast. I kept getting disconnected. Now, if I were truly paranoid, I'd think that what was going on was that the Verizon landline was saying "oh, you want to talk to the competition? Fuck you" and hanging up on me. But that can't be true, for I called on my cell phone.

Some nice male geek helped me out, got everything set up (though I had to politely listen to the sales pitches of All of the Great Things That Comcast Offers On the Web [and which I'll never use]). He said that Comcast's installation disk wants to put on a Comcast toolbar and Windows 7 won't let it, so I should throw the Comcast disk away (good enough).

So it works. And I have a wireless router working on it, as well.

Only wasted a good part of the day, but it's all good. Now.

I checked around to see who had good deals on broadband in my area. There are two providers, Comcast and Verizon. Verizon is DSL only; Comcast offered nearly three times the bandwidth for a better price.

So a week ago on Monday, I called Comcast and placed an order for a self-install kit. The nice lady on the phone said it would take "three to five business days" for it to arrive via the Dudes in the Brown Uniforms.

A week ago today was Business Day #1. If you count them off, you will see that yesterday was Business Day #5.

No Dude driving a Big Brown Van has shown up at my door. If I need to do anything serious on the Intertubes, it will be off to the local library.

You would think that I would have known better than to trust Comcast's cracked residential service team. By Grabthar's Hammer, those people could fuck up screwing a 20 watt bulb into a socket.

But I already knew that. And yet, I chose to give my business to ComBastards (may vermin infest their bowels).

They can screw that up, but you just know, Gentle Reader, that they will have no trouble billing me for it.

Fuckers. May they all bleed from the eyes.

(Since I am on dial-up, I'm not going to take the time to surf the `tubes for news and snark today, so you'll have to entertain yourselves with the blogrolls.)

Their marketing is pretty deceptive.

I get advertising flyers from the two high-speed ISPs in this area: Comcast and Verizon. Comcast advertises that their service has "a maximum speed of 6Mbps". Verizon, which is still only offering DSL in these parts, advertises 1Mbps.

This is what is deceptive: Nobody gives a shit about bits per second. File sizes are not measured in bits, but bytes. There are eight bits in a byte. So if you want to download a large file on Verizon, you might as well go get yourself a cup of coffee, as that 10MB video is really 80Mb and, since the maximum speed is rarely ever achieved, it'll take awhile.

And if you have dial-up at 56Kbps, which is usually more like 48Kbps, you can go cook a meal and do a load of laundry.

I've blogged before about the fact that those jerkholes at ComBastards now require that everyone have cable boxes for expanded basic cable. That means, of course, that you can no longer watch one show while taping another. Worse, you cannot set up a VCR/DVR to record shows that are on at different times at different channels. You have to manually switch the box to the second channel.

What I once did was that if I wanted to tape a show at 10pm and then catch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at 11, I'd set the VCR to catch a rebroadcast from Comedy Central at 1AM. I'd do that because the shows these days have an annoying tendency to go a little long. But, like I said, the asswipes at ComBestialitists have made that impossible (unless I want to festoon my living room with cable boxes).

I mention all of that, again, because on Wednesday, I taped Justified and I missed this:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Carroll
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care reform

Fucking Comcast.

As everyone must know by now, in an attempt to escape their reputation as a bunch of over-paid, trigger-happy, kiddie-shooting mercenaries, Blackwater Worldwide ThugCo changed their name to "Xe Services."

It didn't work. Everybody and their dog still calls them "Blackwater".

So, with that massive fail in mind, Comcast decided to change its name to "Xfinity", because nothings says "we are a company that everybody hates" like adopting a new name that begins with the letter "X". In a stunning lack of sense, ComBastards now also refers to themselves as "XF", which is probably fitting as they are one extremely fucked up entity.

I don't know what Comcast is trying to pull off. They could change their name to the "Mother Theresa and Her Adorable Puppies Cable Company" and everybody would still hate them.

No, I'm not blogging about the Boxer, but one of my favorite blog targets: Comcast. As you may have heard, Comcast wants to buy NBC. In Comcast's statement, was this whopper of a lie:

we believe that this transaction is, and will be determined to be, pro-competitive, pro-consumer, and strongly in the public interest

"Pro-competitive" and "pro-consumer" are two terms that that are among the very last adjectives that I would ever apply to Comcast. I've not known anybody to have have a good word about Comcast's attitude towards its residential customers. Everyone I know in my area has been more or less royally hacked off at Comcast's switch to digital; everyone knows that Comcast is just fucking with people because they can. In an era of low inflation rates and, in the last year, zero to even a slight touch of deflation, Comcast still keeps bumping their rates up.

There is nothing in the Comcast-NBC merger that will be good for consumers. You can take that to the bank.

And by "hate", I mean as if it were expressed by Lewis Black or Patton Oswald.

When broadcast TV switched to digital, you needed to either get digital gear or a converter box. If you had the digital crap, you were good, you didn't need the box.

But no, not Comcast. They have used their "switch to digital" to fuck over their customers. If you have any digital equipment, it won't help you one bit, for everything has to go through Comcast's fucking gear. Say, for example, you wanted to tape a show that ran from 9PM to 10PM and then another one from 11PM to Midnight. That was easy with a DVR or a VCR, just set it to grab both shows. But that won't work with Comcast's goddamn new cable box, for as far as your TV and VCR is concerned, you now only get one channel.[1]

All this reveals the truth behind Comcast's switch to digital: It was all done for Comcast's benefit and it was done with total disregard for its customers. As far as using Comcast, there is no difference now between Comcast and DirectTV. Oh, you can get "Comcast On Demand", but since my only demand to Comcast would be to start giving a shit about its residential customers, that's not going to happen before there is meaningful competition everywhere. About the only conceivable thing I would watch on "Comcast On Demand" would be the drawing and quartering of the top executives of Comcast.

If you've read my earlier blog posts about Comcast and if you looked at the comments section, you may have noticed that Comcast has people whose job it is to go around the Internet, look for bloggers who are saying bad things about Comcast and respond to them. Their user name is some variant on "ComcastCares1". I say them to them, now, that they can skip over responding to this post. For we all know that Comcast doesn't give a rat's penis about its customers. I can't think of any response that they could give that would convince me otherwise.

By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, I hate Comcast.

[1]After you set up the fucking box and call to activate it, it takes 45 minutes for the stupid box to download whatever it is it has to download. The damn thing probably runs on a stripped-down copy of Windows-ME.

In the great consumer rip-off that was the change to digital TV, one of the points during the "everyone has to get a converter" flap was that if you had cable, you didn't have to worry about it.

But now you do, at least if you have Comcast. You have to get a cable box, even if all you have is "expanded basic" and you don't subscribe to any of the premium channels. And it doesn't help you if you have a digital TV or DVR/VCR, because you still need the frelling box. I gather that means that you can forget about setting your DVR/VCR to record things on different channels, since everything has to go through the damn cable box. Oh, and if you have more than one TV, then Comcast is going to tack on an additional rent charge for more than one of those frelling boxes.

One of the things that Comcast is doing, at least in this area, is "guaranteeing" appointments. That apparently is in reaction to the competition from both Verizon FIOS and local cable start-ups, both of which have had considerable success in taking away disaffected customers. (The "guarantee" doesn't apparently mean anything; you won't get back the day's pay you lost waiting for the cable guy to show up, nor will you be able to bust a cap in the ass of his boss.)

I don't know what it is with Comcast. I've been pissed off at them ever since they bought out the locals and began with the "we're giving you two more channels because we like you" routine, followed, in a month or two, by "we're raising your rates four bucks". Residential users are not customers to Comcast, they are a crop: Supply them with cable, fertilize them with bullshit and harvest money.

Then there is the fact that where I work, we have high-speed internet through Comcast. The rates for business internet and home expanded basic cable are not significantly different, but the customer service could not be more different. If I call them up for a business issue, their customer service could not be more helpful. Those guys really do try. But try to get an answer from the residential services side of Comcast and it's as though you called up Dale's Happy House of Retards to consult on the design of a new nuclear reactor.

So now I have to truck on down to their offices and pick up a stinking box and disassemble my TV cabinet and wire it in and have another remote and each time I use it, you can bet your ass that I will pissed off once more at Comcast and be hoping that Verizon gets FIOS into this area pretty damned soon.

I hate Comcast.

Actually, damn all of the cable companies and telephone companies to Hell. Damn everyone who does not damn the cable companies to Hell.

This is what I really hate about them: Their bills are nothing but a pack of lies. Comcast says that the cost of my cable service is $39.45. But by the time the finish tacking on every fee they can possibly think of, it's over $62.

Comcast even has a separate fucking fee for what it costs them to obey the law, they call it a "regulatory compliance fee." Every other business in the real world considers obeying the law a cost of doing business and if there are any real costs involved, it's figured into their pricing. But not Comcast or Verizon, oh no, they charge you for that.

Verizon is even worse than Comcast (hard to imagine), for by the time they get done with all of the additional fees and taxes and surcharges, my $20 landline is over $40. I'm surprised that there is not an "executive washroom maintenance fee", but I am almost reluctant to suggest that as it will appear on my next bill.

What brought this on was a little note in the mail that Comcast is raising its fee by $2, but you know that by the time they finish adding on more fees, it'll be more like $7. All of these fuckers are doing that, but what they don't realize or they don't care is that they are after bits of a shrinking pie. People are making less money these days, at least those who still have jobs after Bush, Greenspan and Gramm got done with driving the economy off a cliff.

Cable TV is not a necessity of life.