My internet connection has been erratic since Thursday and now it’s out completely. Two Comcast technicians searched everywhere in my apartment (including behind all my furniture and in my storage closet), my landlady’s basement and her backyard (quite an ordeal, since all the gates are iced shut) before they finally decided it was a bad connection on the pole in the alley behind my building.
Someone would be around Monday to fix it, they told me.
Then I got a call from customer service telling me they couldn’t fix it until Tuesday.
Just shoot me.
I’ve had Comcast Internet service for awhile now, long enough to have lived through several service outages. Here’s how it works:
1. Everything works — and since you’re not a complete fool, you gratefully practice the active meditation of Not Messing With It — until the moment that it suddenly stops working.
2. Call Comcast, wait, etc., and, once you reach a Nice Technical Support Person, you
3. Tell the NTSP that everything worked and you were Not Messing With It, and then suddenly it stopped working.
3a. Ask the NTSP if there is a service outage in your area.
4. Listen as the NTSP tells you that nothing is wrong, so far as Comcast knows, and walks you through basic troubleshooting: Disconnect your router. Plug your computer’s network cable into the cable modem. Power-cycle the cable modem. (Tell them that you’re running Windows … they can’t work with you if you tell them that you’re running Linux. Unsupported anathema.) Telling the NTSP that it is unlikely to be anything to do with your equipment since you were Not Messing With It will get you precisely nowhere … Oh … and if you Did All That already, you can Do It Again for the NTSP.
5. The NTSP will try to schedule a service call for the 4-hour window of your choice. This is much easier to schedule if you happen to choose the day the NTSP has picked for you.
6. Ask the NTSP again whether, before scheduling a time-consuming service call for your home, Comcast could check whether there is, in fact, a service outage in your area.
6. Repeat step 5 until the NTSP tells you that, why, yes, there is, in fact, a service outage in your area.
7. Cancel the service call.
8. Act surprised the day of the service call when either
(a) Comcast phones to confirm that you are home to receive the Comcast service person, or
(b) the Comcast service person simply shows up, because the service call was never cancelled, or
(c) both (a) and (b).
9. Sometime after Step 7 Comcast restores service to your neighborhood, city, state, or nation. Maybe before Step 8 or maybe not. Step 8 will loop until Step 9 occurs.
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
dog knows i tried
No sympathy from me. The best we can get at my house is a half-speed (either 24.0, 26.4, or 28.8 kbps) dialup connection that often does not work at all. Broadband is not available.