Thursday, September 24, 2015

Comcast


I am cross with Comcast for hiking my bill repeatedly and significantly too. There have been technological changes, it is a challenge keeping up, they went digital, they went HDTV, they changed the terms of our agreement due mostly to industry changes. 

We cannot expect to stay locked into old technology for long. Tech companies bringing this change to their customers acknowledge the tricky business and how they manage these changes in series is everything. Companies must anticipate and capitalize new areas while shedding the areas that support them. 

This is not only a rant. This is an insight. 


The insight is Comcast annual increases are built in. Subscribers must get worked up about their automatic regularly scheduled annual increase and argue a new contract each and every year or accept a higher bill each year. That is Comcast business model. To soften the matter Comast altered contractual language so the discussion is about you accepting their "promotion." 

Don't like it? 

They already know that. Long before I came along. 


To steer those industry changes, to influence important laws and regulations bearing on their industry and their position within it Comcast owners and management are heavily active politically, as I understand by following conservative sources, not only donations and lobbying also most annoyingly with content by programming and by regular basic propaganda techniques, done with subscriber's money, programming that is purely rotten set up in counter to successful FOX who they regard as purely rotten along with, say, pushing transgender programming running simultaneously on several channels, even the same family on multiple channels at the same hour for days on end.
Comcast made a valiant effort to purchase Democratic support for its proposed $45 billion merger with Time Warner. Alas, the cable giant failed but not before the firm dropped millions upon millions of dollars on fees to lawyers, lobbyists, and investment bankers.
We have it easy, a good deal is offered. Life is great. Talked it up with our chums. Automatic payments really are convenient for regular things by removing the hassle for regular standard utilities that are paid no matter what. We trust the agency their reliability, we rely on the agency's trustability. This automatic payment jacking of Comcast, their business model, violates that trust egregiously and obviously even childishly, ridiculously, stupidly. We allowed your hand in our pockets but only because of trust and now that trust is destroyed so carelessly. Twenty dollar increase, then at a year another twenty dollar increase, within that month, within two weeks another ten dollar increase. 
The last ten dollars is presented as a new bill immediately after paying the last bill. Now ten dollars more. 
Email notification of increase immediately following an automatic payment, and within an hour of activating the Samsung phone purchased through Sprint. Boom. There's Comcast Xfinity email tacking ten dollars onto my Comcast bill. 
I know, right, post hoc ergo propter hoc innt. 
I'm so fallacious imagining them connected. How wild of me. On the phone Comcast customer service denied any connection between my phone and their new increase three times. Three separate people I wore out. Three separate calls over a full day. Simply no connection at all. Their records show coincidence. The "promotion" expired. Just then. Just like that, my promotion expired. Year's up! They couldn't time it with a regularly timed bill. They are such bullshitters
Three customer service people told me in succession through the day there is no connection between them, between new phone and increased bill inserted between normal billing, rather, that what happened is my "promotion" expired. They cannot remove the item as I demand. I can however negotiate a new "promotion." 
All three kept using the phrase "promotion" they must drill this language. All three attempted this hypnosis by assuming "promotion" when I so strongly refused any such thing. 
I never responded to any "promotion" in fact I resisted every "promotion" offered and there were many many many "promotions" shoved in my face. Comcast really pushed their encompassing package very hard. Through my mailbox and knocking at my door, entering my apartment, casing my equipment, offering the same "promotion" involving a cell phone service that I insisted over and over I do not want. I do not want to bundle. NO BUNDLE. I never want to see another Comcast "promotion" again. I do not want their package that includes a phone. I said that repeatedly and they rejected what I told them repeatedly, and now as if all that didn't happen as if I can so easily forget their many many many offers and their endless promotions, they all three are using the same language by saying MY promotion is expired, the one with the phone on it. Too convenient. No. I am being lied to. That type coincidence does not happen, no, there never was any acceptance of "promotion." I refused that repeatedly. It never was and it never expired, and certainly not the moment a new phone is detected, I'm hassled on it, and I'm shot an email through regular channels, that I'm back to their "promotion" that includes their phone service AND it expired. Pay again, ten dollars more. 
All Comcast service contracts expire every year and Comcast issues a new contract with an automatic price increase EACH YEAR unless the customer calls Comcast and negotiates a new contract. 
That is their business model. But they speak of it entirely differently as if you were born yesterday and brand new to televisions, and telephones, and cable and internet access and to contracts. As if I don't know how to say, "No thank you" to a "promotion." 
Does it get any more Democrat than that? Viewed as templates to approaches to customers and to tax paying public overlap perfectly with no holes. 
Throughout the whole thing all billing and all Comcast sales people discuss the living contract as the "promotion" you went for. 
Promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion. 
Their entire business structure with their customers is based on your contract regarded in their make believe world as "promotion" with a one-year expiration date and an automatic price increase at the end of one year. They expect you to call and renegotiate if you noticed and don't much care for the increase. Ask for "valued customer department." Every year. Keeps everyone guessing. Every year. Keep all customers pissed off. Every year. That is their business model. Change the language from ordinary understanding of ordinary contracts and change the arrangement to the expectation of automatic increases no matter what unless you get mad as hell, threaten to rip out the wires from the wall, traipse right through Tourette'ssynromelandia, come WAAAAAAY out of Christian character to be passed along to their "valued customer" specialist. 
Meaning their Asshole specialist. And boy, is she ever good. 
It's not good for blood pressure
It's not good for spiritual advancement of either parites. Not good for peace on Earth
It made me a bad person. They had to put up with me. Worse, they expect it and are very well prepared for it. It's usual with them. That's wrong. They have to go. 
And that's not even having a surface glance at cable programming. The truly great promise that never delivered. The idea was subscribers would avoid ads and get great individualized programming. Beautiful. Sign us up by the millions. We'll get great stuff like history channel. Now all I see when I tune in is Ancient Aliens. 
I could kill that guy. Giorgio A. Tsoukalos This is just one example of many examples of tired scrape the barrel programming. 
Every time I see Ancient Aliens on t.v. I go insane. It must go for sanity's sake. They take the simplest decorative design element of twined cord and by exceptional computer graphics turn the design into a dna strand beautifully. Since dna strand, then aliens. What else could it be? They keep asking all the way through, "Could it be that…?" in each case the answer yelled angrily at the t.v. is resounding, "NO!" But they keep going on and on and on, program after program, week after week. They get richer and richer and the public gets more and more stupid. It is a straight up effrontery to our ancestors who were far more capable and clever than these alternate history douchebags ever imagine or accept. Aliens make more sense to them. It's a History Channel crap switcharoo. They've got to go. 
The rampant affected Yalie Eli stuttering, the mic enhanced ear puncturing glottal stop loaded "I-I-I-I think" out of every single cable pundit's mouth, the signal they're not quite organized, the signal they're still a bit humble through all this adulation, the signal they don't know what they're talking about and that we are being bullshitted, has got to go. 
That is what cable service delivers. Today it's pope crawling all in and out Washington, tomorrow it's hyperventilation over separation of church and state.
The rented equipment is nonsense. It all has to go. All wires. Out.
Too annoying, Xfinity is RIGHT there when when the phone is first turned on. Before you know how to take a call (swipe not press the button, the only button that does that. You must learn this. It's how you hang up too. Swipe. Not press. The one thing that's different. The most essential thing. Different, clearly to avoid accidents, but still, it must be discovered) There is Xfinity intruding on the learning experience at the very beginning of a very steep learning curve there is Xfinity intruding, like a bully, "Are you signed up yet?" "Signed up?" "Be sure to sign up." "Xfinity here." "Don't forget Xfiinity." "Did you sign up yet?" "Don't be an idiot, sign up for Xfinity." Sign up for Xfinity
FREE APP
Locate hotspots 
FOR FREE
You're trying to learn how to hold your phone so it doesn't automatically take a photo of your scowling face and send it to Mars. You are trying to learn the essentials of how to power on without opening programs in series that you don't want opened. You're trying to learn how to breath without contacting the FBI automatically. Trying to learn how to get things off your screen that happened by accident and there is Xfinity pushing their FREE service. You're already an Xfinity customer so this is all FREE, FREE, FREE, gloriously FREE. Xfinity is FREE. Pay attention to Xfinity it's FREE. Did you see? FREE! Here's an email for you FREE!
Also pay attention to FACEBOOK an icon that you cannot make go away.
Say hello to GOOGLE you're Andrioid, it comes with the territory.
Hello CHROME 
Hi MSN
All icons up front and so very important for your telephone activities. 
All companies that paid dearly to make sure they're built into our experience. The companies we tried so very hard to avoid purposefully by going with Sprint by going with Samsung brings all of their distant and near kinfolk with them and now you are married by extension absolutely. And there is no getting rid of that awful ne'er do well brother-in-law, Comast. 
And there's an email from ne'er do well brother-in-law Comcast charging another ten bucks on top of the unlimited data plan with Sprint. 
Why would one want that? I did not do that. I do not want that. 
They say people do want internet backup. Maybe they do. But me, now, at the beginning, doing this because I'm cross with Comcast to begin with? No. 
Comcast refused to take the new telephone charge off my phone. They simply cannot do it. There is no way to do it because they are not separate. Because they are separate. That's a separate "offer" and that phone thing is inseparable from the "promotion." That expired. Just now. Separately inseparable, needs a renegotiated "promotion." Coincidentally. Coincidentally. Coincidentally. Three times on three calls from three separate people all looking at the same information limited to the same language of "promotions." 
They refused to acknowledge any connection new phone and their new billing covering phones.
They reveal the lie by mentioning telephone service when discussing their "promotion." the bundled service that WILL NOT DIE that I steadfastly and repeatedly refused. 
I told them a million times get off my back about telephones. Get your octopus arms off me. 
Feel the Tourette's coming on? A clear technologic built-in programmed connection they deny through language. They lie through their faces right at you and say you did something you did not do. Their model is bogus and run like a casino. Run like living Democrats, honestly the template of political and language manipulation is perfect. Hand in pocket pulling cash out by the wads fifty dollar bills, hand over fist and then use these built-in scheduled increases precisely as the government and political party do and all that cash goes to further distort in order to have it this way. And call it something else. Talk about the whole deal using contrived language and insist on this new language throughout, recognize nothing other, precisely as Democrat progressives do. They convince themselves first that you did something you most certainly did not do, accept their bundled service. I never accepted their stinking-ass bundled service because I did not want to be married to Comcast further with phone. I don't care how fantastic the service. If anything less Comcast not more. I said that repeatedly. Just like that. Exactly like that. In each instance Comcast just flat does not hear it. At each miserable moment there is Comcast Xfinity insisting I marry its fifteen daughters. Shoving itself onto my Sprint phone escape pod and I could not possibly be more cross with a company. Except for American Airlines. They must go. 
And you can tell that to them directly. All the customer service people you care to speak with. They heard it ALL before. They expect it. Their business model is based on it. The only customers who don't get worked up are the dummkopfs who simply oblige and pay the steady increases without blinking. That's who Comcast business model relies upon. Everybody else gets a contract reworked to something more acceptable, something tailored bearing on their level of tolerance. And do this each year. The whole thing has to go. 
And it will. 
I needn't say or do anything. The practice will go down on its own. A thing like that is too rotten to last. It's not just little insignificant me feeling it. In the meantime this is me pissing right along and paring back far as we can go. I am not saying Comcast will fail, but this business model they're using presently will fail. They are dying inside and out and it shows, the language that I used that whole miserable day is unacceptable for business and Comcast business practice is modeled around it presently, their acceptance of horrid emotional language without hanging up and their company-wide training to steer the emotion their practices create has the scent of death to it even as Xfinity expands to the very front of each person's cell phone experience and does that immediately, and apparently thrives as a well hooked up company, for the present time.

7 comments:

rhhardin said...

Pay with a virtual credit card number. You can cancel it at any time. Then they can't charge you anymore when they say they can't cancel you over the phone.

ampersand said...

Dropped cable a long time ago. I heard at the start of this year Comcast tacked on a charge for carrying local channels. And a charge for local sports, if you wanted it or not. They were to provide local service to get the franchise. Also if you wanted HD content you had to pay extra.
I dropped cable when Comcast started charging fees for digital boxes that were free originally. There's nothing on cable that's worth the extra price.

We get close to 50 over the air channels now. That's more than enough.

I still use Comcast for internet, I have the slow speed package which is fast enough for me. However I think Comcast is trying to force users to higher speed packages. I own my own modem and now they're sending letters telling me I have to upgrade to a more expensive modem.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Verizon is the same Chip. I agree to a 2 year deal and I pay about $185 per month when the 2 years is up my bill creeps up to $240 and I have to call and take a nother 2 year deal and it goes back down to $186.

rcocean said...

I thought this kind of "automatic" renewal was illegal. Its like someone sending you a letter and saying you've joined their book club at $20/month unless you write them and say no.

The reason Comcast does this is quite simple. they're a quasi-government monopoly that's protected by bribed congressmen.

In any case, I'm cutting more cord as soon as I can.

rhhardin said...

It's funny this comes up. TimeWarner just strung fiber optic cables and showed up at the door to offer me high speed internet for less than I'm paying for DSL.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Comcast can bite my butt.

Get an antenna. You'll only get crappy local service, but it's better than nothing. You'll of course still need to sell your soul for internet service.

Methadras said...

Where I live we either have Cox Cable or Time Warner, but I also live below the biggest antenna farm in the county of san diego that broadcasts all of their tv and radio from there, so an indoor HD antenna works perfect and have total line of sight without a single obstruction. Raw, uncompressed 1080i/1080p signal looks really nice.