Comcast Doesn’t Disappoint

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

So we all know that dad is without cellphone currently, so I have the land-line as a backup in case he needs it for an emergency or something. However, when it rains, the phone usually stops working. Internet and TV generally work okay, but in heavy rain there’s no phone.

I have our voice-mail set up so it emails me when there’s a new voice-mail message. We have an answering machine hooked up to pick up the phone before the voice-mail, because dad is able to work an answering machine better than voice-mail. So when I actually -get- a voice-mail email, then I know the phone is out because the answering machine didn’t pick up the call. (Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head…)

So I called to test, and yes, it was out. This did not sit right with me having my dad without a phone so I decided to call technical support and they offered to have a guy out today between 5-9pm. I asked to leave work early and went home to be there to answer questions since dad doesn’t know much about the cable.

The guy was pretty rude from the get go. Maybe he didn’t like working on a Friday evening, but considering he was only here for half an hour, he can suck it up. He checked out our “cable box” and said that a wire was loose, so that must be what was causing the outage. By this time the phone was back on because it stopped raining, so I told him that no, I had been gone all day and my dad doesn’t use the office so he couldn’t have bumped the phone out of commission. I also explained that the phone goes out ONLY when it’s raining.

The technician “politely explains” to me that Comcast uses fiber optic cable now so it’s impossible that rain would cause an outage, he insisted it must have been the loose cable. Another cable guy shows up (they seem to work in twos these days) and has to help the first guy work my computer and keyboard (like literally show him where keys were). The entire time they’re both talking to me like I’m an idiot that doesn’t know anything about how all of this works. Eventually they decide to go outside and check the line out there after much insistence on my part that rain is causing the problem.

They were out there for about 15 minutes looking around, and eventually came back to let me know that when the cable was originally hooked up in October that it wasn’t hooked up correctly. Some wires were not put together right, and there were still some old wires being used outside, so rain was……..knocking the phone out.

GENIUS I AM.

At least they gave me $20 off my next bill for my troubles. But don’t come to my house and sass me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.