SpicyLemon's dashboard

SpicyLemon replied on October 16, 2008 19:03 to the question "Can someone fix really annoying issue with the automated phone answering thing." in Comcast:

I used to have a similar issue. I lived in GA but had a cell phone from MT. I think to get around it I had to enter a random GA phone number. comcast's phone system has been terrible for a long time and they don't seem to be fixing anything with it. At least you don't have to talk to it.

SpicyLemon replied on October 02, 2008 21:55 to the problem "Comcast Blunders.. 13% packet loss for 2 months. Games Unplayable, Streaming Video Unwatchable" in Comcast:

My favorite is when I was complaining about packet loss and all the tech could could understand was "slow." He tried to tell me that upgrading to their gamer package would fix the problem.

Heh, a funny anecdote came out of that conversation too. I kept talking about my 500ms - 1000ms latency. The tech finally told me he didn't know what that meant. I explained what it was and he said, "Oh, we refer to that as 'uptime'." Then it hit me. The reason comcast has so many problems is because their servers measure uptime in milliseconds! (Uptime is the term used to describe how long a server has been on, or "up" since it's last reboot).

SpicyLemon replied on October 02, 2008 21:48 to the problem "Comcast backs out on their word" in Comcast:

If I had a nickel for every time comcast said one thing and did another, one comcast tech completely contradicted another, it would have paid for my service and then some.

It's too bad that comcast isn't hurting as bad as Lehman Bros. were.

SpicyLemon replied on October 02, 2008 21:34 to the problem "I'm trying to purchase your product . . . just let me!!!!" in Comcast:

Save yourself the trouble. The first time something goes wrong you will have the exact same issues getting someone out there to fix it. You're peeved at not being able to get someone out there to hook it up for a month. Imagine if you were paying for it already and it was broken and you had to wait a month to get it fixed.

Some day, comcast will understand that for most people, taking time off of work is not an option. Money's tight as it is.

SpicyLemon replied on September 27, 2008 22:09 to the question "How do I file a grievance for bad customer service and billing issues?" in Comcast:

Your local Better Business Bureau is a good place to file a grievance. You can easily find it by going to http://welcome.bbb.org/ and entering your zip code.

SpicyLemon replied on September 27, 2008 22:04 to the question "Why can't anyone at Comcast get this straightened out?" in Comcast:

They can't get it figured out because they know that they don't HAVE to figure it out. Odds are you're going to stay a comcast customer no matter how terrible their service is. Consider yourself lucky that you're only at 6 hours. It took me over 20 hours before I started getting fed up. I should have been fed up after the first 45 minutes... which was hold time.

SpicyLemon replied on September 25, 2008 01:44 to the problem "Comcast "Out of Control" - it's Scam-Tastic" in Comcast:

If you ever get them to actually realize that there's a problem on their side, bravo. I gave up on comcast before they made this revelation. It was always my modem, even though the modem works great now that I'm with a different cable internet provider. I even presented them with tracerout information and ping information from all angles.

Haven't you ever had problems with your comcast service before? All customers are retards and couldn't possibly know more than the "tech" support agents.

SpicyLemon replied on September 22, 2008 16:47 to the problem "They know they suck - and they don't care." in Comcast:

That's the exact same feeling I got when I was a comcast "customer."

I can't even being to calculate the amount of time and energy (not to mention cell phone minutes) I had to waste trying to get comcast to fix things.

SpicyLemon replied on September 20, 2008 06:17 to the discussion "channels frozen" in Comcast:

I saw that a couple times with comcast and have seen that a couple times with my new cable company as well. Its the cable box freezing. Often it can be "fixed" by unplugging the cable box for 15 seconds or so. Of course this often results in the loss of all channel information and you have to wait quite a while for it to reload. If it happens often enough you should be able to get comcast to give you a new box.

SpicyLemon replied on September 20, 2008 06:13 to the question "Will those of us with Ike-related extended outages (several weeks) receive a credit?" in Comcast:

One thing that comcast did well for me was issue refunds. The reason you have to wait until service is back is because they want to know the length of time things were out so they can properly pro-rate it. The only complaint I have is that there's no way to flag it in the system to have this done automatically. Once service is back, give them a call and they'll give you a credit for the time it was out.

I never tried it when it was out due to power being out though. It wouldn't suprise me if they said, "Well, power was out for the first 4 days and that's beyond our control. Your cable was out for 9 days. We'll subtract the 4 days power was out and give you a credit for 5 days." However, you could probably argue that you had a generator running to power things and therefore you were affected by cable being out even while power was out.

SpicyLemon replied on September 08, 2008 15:59 to the problem "1 month of service and already to give up" in Comcast:

You're new, it gets worse. They'll fix it for 2-3 weeks and then it'll be broken and you'll have to start all over again. Welcome to the rollercoaster.

A comment on the problem "Comcast Customer Service SUCKS and they LIE about everything" in Comcast:

When I canceled my service I was told I had to pay another month, even though I was paid up through that period and should actually get money back. Since I was leaving town the next day and still had other things to wrap up I didn't argue about it at that time. When I finished my move, I double checked all my bills and records and found that not only had I paid the extra month when I shouldn't have, I had also paid twice for a couple weeks. I contacted the corporate office at 800-266-2278 or 215-286-1700 and they were able to get it handled for me. Good luck. You don't have to pay money for service you're not getting. – SpicyLemon, on September 08, 2008 15:55

A comment on the question "250GB Bandwidth limit with no way to monitor." in Comcast:

Unfortunately, in many places, there is no "down the street" when it comes to comcast. If you want HSI you can either get comcast, satellite (which has some major drawbacks), or DSL. None of them really compare to cable though. I think that's the biggest factor right now. comcast knows that you can't take your business elsewhere and they're taking advantage of it. That seems to be at the root of a lot of the problems I had with comcast. – SpicyLemon, on September 08, 2008 15:45

SpicyLemon replied on September 04, 2008 22:14 to the problem "Comcast Horrors in Ann Arbor, Mi" in Comcast:

Whenever I had to call customer service, it as always on a cell phone as I didn't have a land line. I was never sure if the call was dropped (they were always long calls, more than 30 minutes) or if I was hung up on. I never seemed to have a problem with dropped calls otherwise but I could never say for certain that they hung up on me. Weather on purpose or not, it's something that could probably use a good looking into. It'd be nice to have a way to not have to wait on hold for 20 more minutes when a call gets interrupted.

Maybe comcast needs a trouble ticket system so that at the very beginning of a call they can say, "blah blah blah comcast greeting. In case we get disconnected, your trouble ticket number is xxx." Then in the phone system, have an option to input your trouble ticket. I've seen other companies (big and small) that do that with success.

I'm just throwing that idea out there because you really need help comcast and it doesn't seem like it's really coming from the inside. Of course, I've tossed you other ideas that were ignored..... like not letting the phone system put people into a holding queue that has no-one to answer it. Call 1-800 comcast and direct yourself to sales at midnight.

SpicyLemon replied on September 04, 2008 01:48 to the problem "Comcast Customer Service is the BEST!!" in Comcast:

I've had comcast service set up at two houses. The first one took 3 nights of 3-4 hours on the phone with the tech; having to convince him that i had a cOMCAST account,. That i called cOMCAST to get my cable. A cOMCAST van came out to hook it up but that it's hooked up to the Adelphia pedestal. We checked all the channels, all of which were wrong. I even found the TV guide channel and it said "Adelphia." I had the cable modem hooked up and when I opened a browser it said I needed to register with Adelphia. This all happened on the first day. It took two more days of arguing to get them to come out and hook the cable up to the other (comcasts) pedestal.

In a word: FAIL!

Round 2. I moved. They got the TV hooked up just fine but couldn't seem to handle the fact that the modem was moving. It was another 3 days of calling. It was only 2-3 hours a day the second time though.

comcast service is great when you don't have problems. If the smalles thing goes wrong though, you're screwed.

Moving is a great excuse to go elsewhere. If you don't, you'll have more problems. Then the problems will go away for a short time and you'll be happy. Then you'll have more problems. Welcome to the roller-comcast-er.

A comment on the question "How can we get comcast to come to our town." in Comcast:

First off, your caps lock hurts me. Second off, I'd like to point out the stupidity of your response (besides the unnecessary capital letters).

"This company is cable company in the country, if not the world." Wow. You win. How did you forget to type the most important word in that sentence?

"... I can wait to get verizon..." Then why the FURY?

Look, I had terrible service when I had comcast and I will never use them again. I hate them for wasting so much of my time.

But seriously, rule #1: Think before you submit. – SpicyLemon, on August 28, 2008 14:51

SpicyLemon replied on August 25, 2008 14:26 to the question "Comcast cable???" in Comcast:

I used to have internet outages all the time. I would notice right away because I was either online, one of my roomates was online, or I'd get a text message from one of my outside servers about it. I was told that in order to actually declare an outage, three people on the same street had to call in and make appointments for service techs to come out. The representatives' abilities to test the signals in an entire neighborhood was irrelevant. I was told, several times, that even though they could look at the signals and see that there isn't a single one working, they couldn't declare an outage until they had 3 calls about it.

Because techs were out at my house so often, it was well documented that everything inside the house was functioning properly. Whenever things went out, I always called and scheduled a tech for the next available slot and let them know that I wouldn't be able to make it. Sometimes I'd call and cancel the tech but often I didn't. I figured (hoped) that eventually Comcast would get tired of waisting money on worthlessly sending out techs for them to point out that the problem is off of my property. You'd think that it would only take one tech saying that to initiate fixes. I can't even count how many it took for me; mostly because I gave up before it actually got fixed.

SpicyLemon replied on August 12, 2008 17:18 to the question "Illegal billing policies" in Comcast:

I've had pretty good luck getting questions answered via the corporate office. It's been a while but here's the contact information that I last used.

Comcast Corporation
1 Comcast Center
Philadelphia, PA 19103
PA Tel. 215-286-1700
Toll Free 800-266-2278

SpicyLemon replied on July 31, 2008 21:52 to the question "Comcast cable and the Feb 2009 digital TV switch over" in Comcast:

Many years ago, every TV required some sort of box in order to get the cable channels. When cable first came out, people had to get cable boxes. Eventually, though, TV manufactures started putting the cable boxes in the TVs and today, you can't buy a TV that doesn't have a built in tuner.

Now, though, the cable companies are slowly switching channels to digital. ALmost all older TVs don't have a tuner built in to handle the digital signals so you have to get a box. Many TVs on the market today have tuners that can handle digital signals though. Eventually, the TVs without the digital tuners will break or be replaced and boxes won't be needed any more..... that is untiil the next best thing comes out.

It is annoying to have to have a box though. And its even more annoying that when they move a channel to digital, they don't drop the price for those that no longer get the channel.

Just as cable boxes went away 20 years ago, let's hope they go away again. This is a message to you Comcast: People don't like cable boxes and never will.

SpicyLemon replied on July 31, 2008 06:41 to the question "Comcast cable and the Feb 2009 digital TV switch over" in Comcast:

The analog => digital changeover only applies to the signals sent over the air. That is, if you're using "bunny ears" or some other home antenna, then you need a converter box. However, if you have any form of cable at all, you are covered (regardless of whether or not you have digital or analog cable).

Here's the scoop:

The stations that you can currently pick up via "bunny ears" are being broadcast as radio waves. This ties up a large chunk of the frequencies. Analog broadcast take up about 10 times as much space (on the frequency spectrum) as digital broadcasts use. The FCC wants to trim down the space required for TV so that they can sell the rest of the spectrum and make money. They also need a dedicated emergency band that doesn't conflict with any of the cellular phone companies.

The bottom line is that if you have cable, you don't need to worry about this switchover.