And yet I still want to work there...

If you talk about Comcast to anyone, the first thing they usually do is bring up a story about themselves or someone they know having a real bad experience. The cable doesn't work right, the customer service is lacking, or the value is a real rip-off. This negative word-of-mouth is so consistent that I have to wonder how the company does so well that the CEO is the highest paid in Philadelphia (OK, they do have that monopoly thing going for them).

Anyway, we've been having an issue for the past few months with our digital cable that was really more of a mild irritant than anything else...sometimes we had to unplug the box to get it to work right, sometimes we had to call to get the signal resent. Lately, this problem has gotten worse to the point that we can't get On Demand or the guide at all, and that's after unplugging the box just to get a picture. At this point, we were forced to step up our complaints to the company.
We had a nice guy come out on Saturday who finally figured out a way to fix it, but that only lasted two days before it broke again (yes, it was so consistently screwed up before that two days felt like progress).
Tonight I called and firmly, but politely, asked to have a tech sent back out and suggested that we be compensated in some way. (Customer service veteran tip: The key here is the old 'more flies with honey than with vinegar' adage.) The deal we ended up with was free HBO for a year and free Showtime for 6 months, which is nice because we were in the middle of watching the Tudors, the Showtime series that was free On Demand for the past month. Now we can watch the unedited version (boobies!) Well, at least we will be able to if the guy can figure out how to fix the damn thing tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

S

PS That's Wolverine on top of the TV.