Comcast: The Final (?) Chapter

Throughout the last six months of dealing with Comcast regarding my parents' TV and computer, my sister (anonymous in the comments), has not been able to understand my frustration---until now.

With my parents due home from Florida a few weeks ago, I called Comcast and set up a time for them to go over to the house and reinstate the cable. Pat agreed to give up her Saturday morning and wait for them. Hehehe. The joke was finally on her.

The guy arrived with the necessary boxes, but after one look at the cable running through the house, he refused to hook them up. Something about all of the lines, wires and cables having been installed by Edison. He wanted permission to run new cable.

Now, in his defense, he probably thought it was a reasonable request. After all, the new digital age is coming, and we must all be prepared or we will be left behind in the dust of analog with the dinosaurs and first generation ipods. However, he did not fully comprehend the situation here.

First of all, the cellar is a cellar. Not a basement, not a rec room. A cellar. My father is the only one brave enough to venture down there. The rest of us are sure that there are things living down there that don't suffer the light of day well and are just waiting for some poor, unsuspecting soul to wander down and then....lunchtime, and the milk companies have a new face to put on their cartons.

Secondly, the attic is...well, let's just say that Disneyland this isn't. Although, being near the woods, there have been occasions when mice, squirrels, bats and other assorted critters have been caught scampering around, but they are not animated and generally don't sing and pass out balloons and candy.

As for the rest of the house, it is about two hundred years old, and who knows what (or who) he would have found lurking in the walls. Anything is possible. (Jimmy Hoffa?!? ) The only thing we are certain about is an intricate tangle of wires, cables and coils from my father's attempts to modernize the place over the years. He, and he alone understands this complex system that would have NASA engineers admitting defeat and heading for the nearest bar.

Taking all of this into consideration, my sister refused to take responsibility for the fallout that would occur if she said yes.

She tried instead to reason with the man. She worked with computers for a living, she said. She was used to running cable, she said. All he had to do was leave the boxes, she said. She would take care of the rest, she said.

He said no, and left.

With her dander up, she hightailed it down to the cable company to see if she could sweet talk them out of the boxes with the promise of letting someone swing by at some future date if necessary. She couldn't.

Apparently, the phone lines work faster than her car, and the guy had already called in and told them the whole story. Oh, and the next appointment available was almost a week away. She was not happy.

But, (and here is the part that makes me happy), in order to deal with all of this, she had given her name and number as the contact person, thereby making her the account holder(good to know that regardless of who pays the bills, anyone wandering in off the street can just appropriate an account by giving their name and number, but that's another blog). And now she was stuck dealing with them and I was out of it!

Pat spent pretty much the rest of the day, if not the weekend dealing with the situation, racking up the hours online and on hold. After feeling my pain for only a fraction of the time, we consulted my parents and here was the outcome(I wasn't completely out of it, unfortunately):
they switched to Direct TV and Verizon for the computer and....Pat got the calls from Comcast wanting to know why she had discontinued the service (and you can be sure that that question elicited a really charming response).

She will also get all future solicitations via mail and phone from Comcast begging her to return. Oh, and I've decided to give her name and number to both Direct TV and Verizon too, just for good measure. Hehehe.