July 2011 Archives

(I know I haven't written much lately. Now I return with a completely serious and unfun perspective on politics. You may continue not paying attention to this space. You are welcome.)

We all derive our understanding of the world from our particular perspective. My perspective is as somebody who works in the world of energy. As our demand for power in this country grows, we have two ways that we can respond. We can build more power plants, or we can become more energy efficient. In Texas, each utility has rebate programs where they pay their customers to become more energy efficient. Why would a utility company that makes its money by selling electricity pay its customers to use less of it? Because as demand increases, they have to build power plants, and eventually it actually becomes cheaper to pay your customers to use less than it is to build more capacity. They understand that a megawatt saved is the same as a megawatt produced.

Now think about it in terms of a senior citizen who gets $500 in Social Security every month. If the government cuts her benefits by $100, or levies a tax of $100, what is the difference? If you are a government contractor and your taxes are raised by $1M, or the government cancels a $1M contract, what is the difference? What, exactly, is the difference between a tax increase and a spending cut?

The difference is only in who is affected. If spending is cut on social programs, it is predominantly the poor and disenfranchised who suffer. If marginal tax rates are raised, it is the wealthy and middle class who pay the price. That this is not the rational basis for our national economic policy is due wholly to the influence of money in our politics.

Hating Comcast is all the rage these days, and it's easy to see why.  Perhaps you're a new customer who foolishly purchased their 'Extreme 105' plan, only to discover that the bandwidth cap prevents you from actually using it*.  Or you foolishly tried to legally use a cloud service, such as Comcast's very own file backup service, and got banned from the internet for a year.

But me, I'm a simple man.  All I want is reliable broadband service and a decent selection of cable channels.  So when I moved apartments, discovering that it was a monopoly and Comcast the only provider, shrugged.  I've been a comcast customer for four years, and while transferring service and installs are always painful, I figured it wouldn't be that big a deal.

How wrong I was.  This new apartment was on a 'bulk plan' and finding someone at Comcast even capable of handling that, involved an online customer chat and three separate phone calls.  But once I found someone who would do something besides transfer me to another department, he assured me that it would be entirely self activated and all I needed to do was plug it in.

And it did!

Until yesterday.  Two and a half hours on the phone later, I discovered that the helpful gentleman forgot to move the equipment onto the new account, so it had been disabled.  I was told that 'an email had been sent to dispatch and it would be activated in 1-2 hours'.  This was obviously a lie, and I of course knew it, but my phone was actually dying from being on hold that long.  I then spent my lunch hour taking the settop box to the local comcast store.  It was 'activated' quickly, which apparently couldn't have been done on the phone despite needing no additional information. 

Which didn't mean that it would actually work, of course.  That required yet another phone call to send an activation signal.

Not a single person I talked to was anything less than pleasant and polite, and not a single one had any desire to do anything over rattling off a canned spiel and, upon realizing I was not one of the standard few issues they could handle easily, try to get me to hang up. 

What causes such a sickness in a company?  Certainly it's not a problem with the individual people.  Is it an issue of metrics?  Is call length the only metric in use?  Does the fact that they have what's effectively a monopoly prevent them from caring about customer service at all?**

 


*Here's a fun math problem to play along at home!  How long can you use your Extreme 105 plan to its full potential before hitting Comcast's monthly bandwidth cap, which causes your service to be disconnected for one year after a single warning?

Spoiler:  It's under 7 hours.  Per month.


**Is this a shameless use of this blog to vent uselessly by asking rhetorical questions?  Yes.  Yes it is.