Readers Write: Comcast’s Holiday Hell
From the mailbag, a whole lotta ouch:
Your Comcast cable box breaks.
You go to the big Comcast building on JFK to exchange it, right?“No, that’s corporate–they don’t have no customer service there.” says the phone rep.
He sends you to a squat brick building on Delaware Avenue. The sidewalks haven’t been shoveled.Inside, 20 people are jammed into a small room. It’s overheated for people in winter coats. They are lined up waiting for two clerks behind bulletproof glass. A TV plays infomercials. Loudly.
Over the bulletproof glass, in red letters, is the Comcast Credo: “We will deliver a superior experience to our customers every day….” My wife is with me in this room. She asks the chubby guard where the bathroom is. He shakes his head and smirks. I should never have brought her to this place.A nightmarish fancy flits through my head: “Maybe we didn’t see that tractor trailer turning off Washington Avenue and we are actually dead and this is Purgatory. Maybe we are never leaving this room.”
Finally. A pleasant enough lady swaps our cable box out through a bulletproof turntable device. This is not hell, we think, we can leave, and we do.
At home, we plug the box in. It doesn’t work. After a long time on the phone, the phone rep says, “That’s a bad box. They gave you a pretty old one.”
We know where we must return to.
In case we don’t make it back, here’s a brief sample of our first superior experience. Watch it 10 times for the full effect.
Man. Those are some vibes, too, we guess.
