A vent about ComCast and the internet

It’s Comcastic- Not! Many years ago there was a small regional airline in upstate New York called Mohawk Airlines. The locals used to joke that the airline motto should be “if there is a cloud in the sky, we aren’t.” It’s a slogan that Comcast, our local cable/internet company here in Houston should adopt as well, only in their case it should be “if there is a storm in the sky, anywhere over Texas, we’re down.” This is not rocket science, nor is it anything new. Summer, hot and humid with many, many thunderstorms, and Houston are synonyms. This is why it is a mystery to me that every time there is a roll of thunder anywhere within 100 miles of us, the internet and cable go down. Another mystery is why, although we have an equal number of thunder and lightning storms during the day and the internet goes down with almost every storm, the cable doesn’t seem to. Maybe the weather gods don’t want to miss their daily “shows” although according to the latest news, people who “are forced to work during the day can now download and watch their soaps via the internet.” I love the wording “forced” to work, when they could just be sitting at home, sipping nectar, eating lotus blossoms and watching their soaps. If these poor unfortunate workers plan to watch it at night, however, they are sorely out of luck since the almost daily late afternoon thunderstorms invariably take both cable and internet down for the rest of the night. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is Time Warner, Comcast or Road Runner; although I will say that the problem seems marginally worse now that Comcast (“it’s comtastic”!) has taken over both Time Warner and Road Runner. To top it all off, if you call in to report the outage, all you get is a recorded message stating that “Service is temporarily disrupted in the greater Houston area. Our technicians are aware of and working on the problem.” Even if you call during the day during regular business hours, it is impossible to get through to any other voice recorded or live. This means that they are assuming every single cable and internet outage in the Houston area is due to an act of the weather gods, which they are helpless to control, and that they can forever claim they are working on the problem without ever actually addressing any of the issues involved such as actually interacting with their customer base, customer service or addressing issues other than their "act of God" justification for all other problems. You would think that the powers that be would be able to figure out some way to protect or ground their services so that they would be less vulnerable to weather conditions. Maybe they should figure out an anti-weather shelter sort of like a nuclear bomb shelter for each of their junction boxes and connections. Or maybe, better yet, they would be better off just studying the past two years of weather history for Houston and design a system that would work as history repeats itself summer ,after summer, after summer. I am particularly peeved because I sat home all Wednesday afternoon, waiting for a scheduled service call due between 2 pm and 5 pm. At 5:05 I received a call from a service rep who briefly stated that “your internet problem is a neighborhood problem and our technicians were in the area this afternoon taking care of it so we won’t be sending a service man to you “ and hung up before I could even blurt out a “yeah but my internet is still down" which in this case was really true. I called in again yesterday morning but after the usual “ services are interrupted in the greater Houston area,” there was actually a moment when I managed to slip a memorized extension number in and connect with service, who denied anyone had called me yesterday and assured me someone would be out Friday between 2 and 5 pm. After receiving a mildly invective commentary on that, they agreed to reschedule a service call for today, Friday, between 2 and 5 pm. Plans and activities were arranged so that I could be here in time for the technician. When I answered the telephone at 4:45 pm I felt sure that it was the technician, calling to confirm that I was home. Well it was the technician, but guess what? The internet was out throughout the entire Houston area so he was calling to inform me that he wasn’t going to show because with the entire internet out (and presumably the Martians landing, the world ending and life as we know ceasing to exist because of this outage) there would be nothing he could do and besides, he was just filling in to help out. He did assure me that he would call the schedulers so that they could reschedule, yet again. Well they did call, and they are rescheduled for tomorrow, Saturday from 2-5 pm but (all together now in three part harmony) “it’s raining in Texas, and thunder in the Gulf, there’re tornadoes in Kansas, and Florida needs rain.” In short, if you have a dime, I have a bridge. Technicians from Comcast actually show up and fix something? HA!!!! but I'm not bitter- just resigned.