My pet peeve: The Internet spawns an era of flagrant customer disservice

Part 1: Hell in a very small condo

I rarely express my personal opinions about current affairs—especially politics, which often sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere—but I have recently had to deal with two of our nation’s major communications firms regarding the most insidious plague facing modern man, in my opinion. Worse than politics. And I am seething …

Home Internet service is difficult to live without, especially if you work remotely, as I do, on a laptop which requires uninterrupted availability of service. Decades after it became widely available, our feasible options have narrowed, as the greedy companies which promise much and deliver less have muscled their way into control of the situation—much like the organized-crime mobs who used to dominate the garbage-disposal industry, and using tools not unlike their criminal cousins, with well-lubricated financial connections to the politicians who could, of course, protect the taxpayers and consumers from avaricious companies but prefer not to.

Prices go up while service varies and generally goes down as the greedy firms cut corners. You cannot get a paper bill without paying $5 or more a month for the pleasure of documenting what you already know—it is ridiculously expensive, and you have no options, anyway—and you have to have your monthly charges withdrawn from a bank account or credit card, or you won’t be allowed to play. Talking to a customer service representative, well, requires steely nerves and much time. Trying to “chat” with a virtual assistant—the alternative the companies gleefully steer you towards—rarely produces any lasting satisfaction. It is a fun-house without the fun … welcome to the era of the “revenue stream,” reinforced by the ubiquitous TV ads which persuade watchers, gradually, that even substandard service is something they cannot live without—at any cost.

Before I moved from Northern Virginia to South Florida in 2021, I had never dealt with Comcast (or its preferred alter-ego cum parent, Xfinity). My previous experiences with a series of their regional competitors—including Cox, Dish Network, and Verizon—had left me bewildered and, frankly, angry with their bait-and-switch tactics, deceptive “introductory” deals which disappeared in a year or less, sometimes doubling your monthly bill in a heartbeat with little warning. But I needed home Internet service for full-time remote work in my new condo—which had a long-running contract with Comcast for its 1,900 apartments for TV service, and allowed users to piggyback onto Comcast lines with an extra Internet modem for what they promised was a reasonable fee.

That is when I truly earned the meaning of hell on earth …

Years earlier, in 2019, I had inherited a second home in North Carolina, in which I installed a second home office for use when visiting family members there. To get Internet service there, I was forced to start dealing with Spectrum, which also offered telephone service (which I did want), and TV services (which I did not want). They seemed to be the only realistic game in my small hometown. But as I quickly discovered, establishing service required a lengthy process of having my mother’s yard dug up and new cables installed—much like old land-line telephone companies once used, just not overhead—and drilling a cable-size hole through the brick foundation of my den—and requiring at least three electrical outlets to accommodate all the new equipment.

No matter. Dusty and painful as it was, the installation worked and now, so could I. Friends and family had long bemoaned their rotten experiences over TV issues with Spectrum and Time-Warner Cable (one of its precursors) but I had no real alternative. Little did I know that my problems there would begin only when I decided, earlier this year, to get rid of the service after five years, as I prepared finally to sell my childhood home.

But back to Comcast. I contacted them in mid-2021, from North Carolina, during a three-week stopover en route to my new condo in Broward County, Florida. My wife’s relatives there—some of whom lived in the same vast complex of low-rise buildings we were moving into—had already reported on their average-to-fair experiences with Comcast TV and Internet service. My condo was prewired, and the basic TV service was ostensibly free to all residents (hidden in the HOA monthly fee); telephone and Internet services were available for an additional monthly fee.

The real trick was to make sure that when you called in, you talked to the correct Comcast office—the “bulk” subscribers’ office, not the “ordinary” office—and to avoid, if possible, having a Comcast technician visit to install any new equipment, which almost always required a substantial fee. (“Protection” payments, I call them—legalized extortion …) I would try to install the modem and TV boxes myself—and plug in my existing telephones.

After all, how difficult could that be? I was a grown man with a Ph.D., after all. I had been through this so many times before …

The frustration and prevarication begin …

* * * * * *

I am no whiz with technology. My grandchildren are far smarter than I am in figuring out to follow badly-worded instructions written by people who haven’t the vaguest notion of what clear English should resemble. It comes to them almost automatically. Not to me, who spent nearly two hours guessing which coaxial cable to plug into which modem and how to undo a wrong choice without blowing out the whole condo’s wiring system.

I had once demanded—successfully!—that a Cox Internet technician come in and wire my Alexandria home by swearing the telephone rep had promised me free installation. But wily Comcast was wise to that ploy. They eventually allowed me to talk by phone with a willing but maddeningly robotic-sounding “guide.” The main problem I had was not with the Internet modem, which quickly worked with my business laptop and my personal laptop, but instead with the TV receiver—and its obvious preference for anything but the 32-inch Roku-brand television set we had brought with us to Florida. Our condo was being repainted and remodeled while we lived in my wife’s cousin’s vacant condo a half-mile away—so no one heard me cursing my fate except the cockroaches, who probably snickered …

What I did not realize—no one warned me, and I did not think to ask—too thrilled that at least my laptops connected and too naive to suspect that not everyone else’s would—was that the Internet modem Comcast had sneakily sent me was state-of-the-art. It was not the slightly older version Margaret’s cousin still had, which worked fine for her older laptop over there—and that once Margaret moved in, her older and nearly-outdated laptop would no longer be able to connect to our new Internet modem.

And my life would be thrown into complete turmoil. Who’d a thunk it?

Next up, revenge of the passive-aggressive cyber-gods.

Next time: Part 2: Try getting rid of it, and facing the consequences