Dear Editor,

I’m one of the TCM viewers who got her service of TCM suddenly jerked away.  I get to pay $10 per month in order to keep it. When I complained that I didn’t watch sports, never have, never will, I was told it was also “entertainment and history”—specifically what, I asked. It was a smattering of cop shows (bang, bang, car crashes, explosions, women falling down in high heels fleeing from criminals, etc. of which there are too many already) and the one “history” offering was “military history. “That doesn’t get any sales points from me,” I said, “I’m a Quaker!! (and I really am!  “. I’ve been a Comcast customer since I moved to the Atlanta area in ’85. Just for perseverance I deserve better .

 It didn’t help their standing with me that I have been begging them to fix  a problem with channels 17, 241, 242 and 232 going out sporadically sometimes several times per week or even several time per day. Starting in January they have sent out a total of four techs to my condo and all of them did the same thing over and over alleging they would get a different result. Everything on the inside here has been changed out multiple times. I called again a couple of days ago and they wanted to send a fifth tech out!  I cancelled that one, and I am now dealing with some guys who say they are an “escalation team” which includes a maintenance guy in a hard hat. After replacing a “pedestal” in the yard and running a new cable between it and my unit, the situation finally seems fixed (for now) . The escalation supervisor said he agrees with me that the problem is not a reception problem; it is in the transmission of the signal somewhere up the line and no matter how many times the techs change out everything inside my condo unit it won’t get better. I tried to tell the customer service folks that every time I called. Basically they said, “the computer is making me do it this way.”

 Meanwhile I have an orange cable sitting in the yard unburied with promises to come back and bury it within 10 days. Guess what? At least eight other buildings in my condo community have unburied cables sitting in the yard on the common ground,  and some have been that way for TWO YEARS according to our condo board. I asked the escalation supervisor why couldn’t they have all those other cables buried at the same time along with mine. It would save Comcast a lot of money not to have to send out a truck and crew for each unburied cable and it would go a long way for making at least a dozen unhappy customers happy. Apparently the computer won’t let people do that. There has to be an application filed for each unburied cable, then a separate crew has to be scheduled for each and two weeks is the MINIMUM time it takes to get on the schedule. Meanwhile there are heavy trucks hauling heavy equipment driving all over town unnecessarily not to mention the expense of several hard hat crew men to bury only one cable at a time. If they saw another unburied cable, they don’t have a work order; so they would be unable to do anything about it.

 Comcast is spewing  money as if it were rainwater on this sort of pointless customer no-service. But it is costing them too much to provide loyal viewers with TCM? I don’t think so.

 If I were a Comcast share holder and l knew about the horrible waste of my shareholder profits in senseless and ineffective customer non-care I would be livid!

What this company does makes no business sense. I owned my own marketing business for 20 years, and if I had treated my customers that way, I wouldn’t have had any.

 And “the computer makes me do it” or “the computer won’t let me” are not answers to customers’ problems. Computers have to do what they are told to do. That is called “programming” . They can be programmed to serve customer needs. And even if reprogramming is deemed too costly there are manual over-rides and work arounds that can be taught to customer service reps. It would require some training, and yes it might cost a few dollars, but the retention rate on skilled personnel would be higher than present half-trained non-thinking personnel’s turnover rate. Retention is always less expensive than recruiting and training new people who have no experience. Not to mention it is less expensive to retain a happy customer than to fund the advertising and marketing and the hardware and tech time to add on a new a customer.

 It amazes me that Comcast is in business at all. Are they somebody’s gigantic income tax write off in the loss column?

 Now you may well ask why I have been their customer since 1985 and haven’t bailed out even now with the addition of the insult of the TCM debacle added to the injury of ten months of customer no service. I am a cynic and a Luddite. I don’t believe that the grass is any greener outside the Comcast fence, and even if it were, the stress and aggravation of having to change and learn more and more soon to be obsolete and increasingly expensive technology makes my blood pressure shoot up. I’m 73 years old and have two grandsons, one age six the other age two, and I want to be in this world to go their college graduations and their weddings.

Better the devil I know than the one I don’t know.  Alas!   ☹ 

 Julia Ewen

Photo: Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Designed by Edward Vebell. – U.S. Postal Service; National Postal Museum: Postal Service Employees Issue