mdlbear | Entries tagged with customer service

Comcast: 75-Year-Old Sends a Hammering Blow to Comcast's Customer Service

If there is one 75-year-old you do not want to piss off, it's Mona Shaw. Ms Shaw was in the process of switching her phone service from Verizon to Comcast's Triple Play, but after multiple failed attempts, she went ballistic—with a hammer! Ms Shaw vented her fury by smashing up the local Comcast payment center in Manassas, Center Street, Virginia.

As Mona went ape shit with the hammer, destroying inanimate objects around the office, she was reported to have been screaming, "Have I got your attention now?"

Reminds me of the old story of the mule and the 2x4.

Mood: impressed
Music: If I Had a Hammer - PP&M

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

After my walk -- a pretty reasonable one -- I did a little shopping. I started with Guitar Center, because I wanted to have a look at a lightweight polyfoam case that they had on sale for $50. This is about half the price of a superficially similar gig bag at Guitar Showcase, so I figured it was worth a trip. Besides, it was the first time since they moved to their new location that I had time and they had any parking.

I should know better than to go in there. It's loud enough to interfere with conversation, and the sales droid who latched on to me was highly annoying. Hint: don't ask somebody looking at guitar cases "Do you know what kind of guitar you have?" Look, you idiot -- don't you think I know what kind of guitar I have? And he seemed totally baffled at my annoyance, too, even after I reminded him of what he'd said. Apparently "do you know" is just his way of starting a question, with no intrinsic meaning to him.

I poked around in different parts of the store, fled when some moron cranked the volume on something up to 11, and got a different salesdroid when I took a second look at the case. Unlike other RoadRunner cases, it doesn't have backpack straps or an adequate front pocket, so it's not an improvement over what I have now.

As I said, I should know better than to go in there. Still, they do have good loss leaders from time.

Next stop was Central Computing, which didn't have anything I wanted, then BevMo, which for once had a reasonable supply of Boomsma Oude Genever. They rarely have more than one bottle in stock, so I bought two.

Finally, I went to the bank to get cash for the Dickens Fair tomorrow, and finished up at the Container Store. Picked up a couple of things there, but the one I was particularly after was a flower-shaped tea strainer called "Audrey". It says so right on the box. I mean, with a name like that... I bought three -- two for us and one for the flower_cat's cousin Audrey. I'll probably have to get a few more next week.

Went out for another shopping expedition -- this time with the Cat -- after lunch. Mainly Trader Joe's for a case of "two-buck Chuck". (eta: the Shiraz, this time.) It's moderately drinkable, and makes excellent cooking wine. We also hit the British shop, which yielded a DVD and some marmalade.

A day full of annoyances. Trying to get an authorization code to transfer thestarport.org out of Network ~~Solutions~~ Problems, and discovering that the email they were sending wasn't getting through. Turns out our sysadmin had installed a new spam-filtering appliance on Monday, which of course had a new address. The DNS hadn't propagated to Netsol yet. And the problem I was having yesterday was that the mail server for what used to be the lab's domain when I set up my contact info, rsv.ricoh.com, was down. Naturally it took until 11am or so for our admin to arrive and fix it. But by that time I'd already changed my contact email address to point to my home address here at thestarport.org.

Went out at noon to Fry's (taking the fact that my ankle is bothering me as a sufficient excuse to skip my usual walk) to buy an MP3 player. The ad assured me that the Samsung I bought would play ogg files, and indeed they have a reputation for doing so. Just to be sure, I checked several other vendors (having noticed that many of the boxes had phone numbers on them) and determined that, no, none of them played oggs.

What I didn't discover until I got the damned thing back to work was that it's totally locked down, and will only play files if you transfer them with Windows Media Player. So much for Samsung -- my respect for them just went down several notches.

Actually got a little work done in the latter part of the afternoon (mostly nailing down and documenting the encrypted blob format that finagler's software is writing) before trying to get an appointment with my doctor. The next available one was August 1^st until I mentioned the ankle, at which point I got one for this Friday. OK, I understand about triage. By this time it was 5:05 and the opthalmology department was closed, in spite of the entry in the phone directory that said the appointment desk was open until 5:30.

Back to Fry's to exchange the MP3 player. One thing about Fry's -- they'll take their stuff back for just about any reason. That's why I keep going there.

Aside to whoever took the glass bottles out for recycling: would it have killed you to unstack the bins and put the bottles in the one labeled "glass" instead of just setting them down in the driveway?

Mood: annoyed

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