“I am a great friend of public amusements, for they keep
people from vice.” — Samuel Johnson
It’s been said that America has a lot in common with ancient
Rome, but one key difference is that we no longer feed religious
minorities to lions. Instead, we have cable television and the
Internet to pacify the masses. Who needs gladiators when you’ve got
American Gladiators?
So you’d think that the ongoing efforts of our nation’s public
institutions and private corporations to keep people’s bloodlust
sated would be geared toward making these services as easy to
access as possible. Sadly, in Washington, D.C., where I recently
moved, the opposite seems to be the case.
Why? In a word: Comcast.
Comcast is allegedly a cable and Internet service provider, but
recent attempts to deal with their customer representatives suggest
otherwise. My first call to the company went smoothly, probably
because they were selling and I was buying. A technician was
scheduled to show up at my new apartment and install the apparatus.
I was given a date and a three-hour window in which he was supposed
to arrive.
At 2 p.m., the end of the time window I’d been given, I called
customer service and was calmly reassured that someone would be by.
No more than half an hour. An hour and a half later, desperate for
a wi-fi signal, or even just a rerun of Stargate SG-1, I
called again. “Just 45 minutes!” I was told. I was certain I’d
stepped into one a Star Trek-style time-space distortion
field.
Close to 6 p.m., nearly two hours later, the technician finally
showed up, and things went downhill from there. In my apartment, he
moved slowly and with obvious uncertainty, as if installing coaxial
cables — ostensibly his job — was the equivalent of doing
upper-level calculus.
At one point, when asked a question, he simply froze for several
minutes, staring straight ahead and saying nothing, like a street
mime playing a statue, except twice as annoying. It was the only
time I’d seen a human being experience a total system crash.
Unfortunately, technicians do not come equipped with restart
buttons.
For more than an hour, he fumbled with cables and called
dispatchers. Eventually, he informed me that I would not have
Internet service, and that a senior technician would have to come
on site to fix a problem with Comcast’s TV-on-request service,
OnDemand. Someone from the company would call the following day, he
explained, and all would be set right, which, after a day stuck at
the house waiting for him to show up, seemed unlikely.
AND INDEED it was. Over the next several days, I spent numerous
hours on the phone talking to with a cast of customer service reps
who seemed to be under the impression that “service” means
“cluelessness” or “flatly wrong information.”
Many of them promised to call me back with more information; not
one ever did. I was told at one point that HBO OnDemand was no
longer offered, despite the fact that, at the same time, Comcast’s
own website listed 8 of their top 10 OnDemand
programs as HBO shows. (Perhaps it should be called OnAWhim?)
Attempts to schedule an appointment were met with the line,
“We’ll call you back.” I count it as a victory that I was only hung
up on once. Except for the technician who finally arrived to fix
things, it was unquestionably the worst customer service I have
ever received in my life.
During my time of cablelessness, I ranted to friends, many of
whom told me horror stories of their own — including the person
who’d moved into the same neighborhood the month before and still
lacked service. The kicker? He, she, or it works for a telecom
association.
In fact, for otherwise reasonable residents of our nation’s
capital, the name Comcast sends them into fits of apoplectic rage.
Witness the church-going old lady who took a hammer to her service rep’s keyboard.
People in Washington tend to think of the company in an almost
mythological fashion — an angry, violent beast that swoops in to
kill time and goad its victims, but cannot be defeated, only dealt
with.
But perhaps Comcast is not all to blame. Maybe it is, as my
liberal friends would say, a victim of circumstance. After all, why
should any company bother improving its service when its
competition is limited by city bureaucracy? For a service provider
to operate in the District, it must first be granted a permit to do
so by the city’s Office of Cable Television (that’s right, there’s
an Office of Cable Television) — a lengthy, complicated process
which must eventually be approved by both the DC Council and the
Mayor.
With two companies and satellite television available, it’s not
quite a state-granted monopoly, though many locations are served by
only one provider. However, the regulatory barriers to entry for
any potential competitors remain so high that Comcast can
essentially do as it pleases — including staff its phone banks and
technician positions with the most frustrating people in the
history of world.
Insulated by bureaucracy, it can treat its customers as a
captive audience. It would be too much to directly compare the
actions of either a municipal regulatory or a cable company to
Communism, but, like so many D.C. residents, I feel there is a
great evil at play here all the same.
