Why does it have to be this way? Or, a tale of 2 phone calls...

I have written for and about the cable industry for a number of years. I know many of the people in the industry well. I like you all as individuals. BUT, why oh why does every encounter with you as an industry leave me feeling so *disappointed*?





We are building a new house in Sanibel. My job today was to establish phone, Internet and TV service for our new house. Since we already have condos in Sanibel I am pretty familiar with the telco and cable company that service the area. My experience has taught me that the telco can't offer fast enough internet to satisy my needs. The cable provider can offer the triple play--but the island is subject to enough outages that I don't want to rely on cable for my primary telephone service. So, my solution was simple--telephone from the telco and Internet and cable from the cable guys.





Here's what happened. At the end of one phone call with the telco, I had an account number, a date for dialtone, an assigned phone number, information on what my billing date would be and what it would cost me. They also took the phone number of our contractor to reach on site for any unexpected problems in establishing service. By the way, I did not have to hold for more than a minute to get connected to a repl.





And the cable story? It started with a long wait on hold, followed by someone who wanted my address even though I said it was new construction. What a surprise--he couldn't find the house number in his database!! I was then told they would have to send someone out to verify that such a house actually exists and that they would call me back in around 4 days when they had verified that it does!!! I didn't even get to the point of any converstaion about what the offers might be, when I could get something established, etc. I had no record of my call--like a # that I could call back or something!! Just a promise of a call in four days.





Hey guys!*&* You surely can do better than that!





PS As I was writing this I got a phone call to ask about my satisfaction with the Comcast experience. You can image how my ratings looked....

Post post script: Maybe there is hope after all! Although they had told me it would take several days to get anything moving, I had a phone call shortly after the customer saifaction phone call. It was a tech telling me he would drive to Sanibel tomorrow and verify that there is really a house there.

Don't quite know what to make of it. Were they just underpromising and overdelivering as the tech said. Or did someone monitor the negative results?? Seems hard to believe that it could have been that quickly.

Oh well--maybe there is a Santa Claus. Let's see what happens next.