Just Comcastic, Part II

From the May 2008 Reader's Digest in "Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Guerrilla Guide to Getting What You Paid For (Without Getting Arrested)" by Ben Popken:

Mona Shaw walked into her local Comcast customer-service office one day last summer swinging a claw hammer. The feisty 75-year-old clobbered several pieces of office equipment before she was stopped. "Now do I have your attention?" she asked.

Reliable phone service was critical for Shaw and her husband. They lived in rural Bristow, Virginia, with no neighbors nearby and a history of calling for emergency medical assistance. The Shaws were switching to a Comcast phone-Internet-TV package, but after days of spotty phone service, a botched installation attempt, a missed service appointment, and blithe indifference, Shaw decided to visit the Comcast office.

She waited two hours for the manager before a customer-service rep announced that he had gone home for the day. That was the last straw for the secretary of the local square-dancing club. Shaw went back to her house and fetched her hammer. "They thought just because we're old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone," Shaw told The Washington Post.

Was Mona Shaw's reaction extreme? You bet. She received a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, a $345 fine for damages, and a year-long restraining order that barred her from going near the Comcast office. Consumers across the nation identified with her frustration.

What the Reader's Digest never told us was whether Mona Shaw ever got her Comcastic! Phone-Internet-TV working, or whether someone came in to put a satellite on her roof so she could talk on the phone and surf the Blogosphere without violating the restraining order. I posted my Comcastic! Complaint here last weekend, and it has now been a week since the Comcast tech came out to my house to try to fix the problem. I'm still blogging with intermittent Internet access, constant DNS errors ("oh, our DNS server is down, we have no idea when it will be back up"), and frequent trips to the basement to turn my Comcastic! cable modem off and on. Today I'm working on my annual Mother's Day photo calendar on Kodak Gallery, and I'm wondering if I'm going to have to head out to Starbucks to upload my photos using their Internet hot spot, cuz it sure ain't working here. And it is really hard to vote on a Battle of the Blogs when you can't see either of the blogs to decide!

So if you're waiting for my EntreCard drops or missing the friendly comments that I've tried to leave on your blog, please be patient…one day, it's all going to be Comcastic!