Little Old Lady Hammers Comcast 416
WheezyJoe writes "The Washington Post reports that a little old lady took a hammer to Comcast.
Apparently fed up with the lousy service she received from a botched Comcast installation of "triple-play", and a completely humiliating experience at a customer service center, 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw took her claw hammer back to the customer service center and bludgeoned the office equipment into tiny plastic pieces."
Re:Comcast Is Deluded (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Go lady go lady go lady go... (Score:4, Insightful)
Only a 75 year old white lady can get away with something like that. If it was a 15 to 25 year old black male, then he would already be in Gitmo...
Re:Comcast Is Deluded (Score:3, Insightful)
Not quite. Comcast is planning to have the Tivo interface sometime in the (far, far) future, but for now we're stuck with the PlaySkool OS that can't seem to figure out that when I tell it to record "new episodes of Family Guy", I don't mean "every single episode of Family Guy that Fox airs, which amounts to two a day, every day of the week, and sometimes three". The Microsoft interface never did that (though the Microsoft interface did want to record every rerun of the Sopranos when I told it to only record new). I'm pretty sure this is a tagging issue in Comcast's listing service, where reruns are incorrectly tagged (either tagged as new, or not tagged at all and thus assumed to be new).
For the original poster, you can cancel future recordings by flipping through the "Scheduled Recordings" pages. There's no single "TODO" list anymore, so you have to flip through each day until you run up against the end of the current listing download. Deleting is also more difficult, going through several menus with many annoying pauses. And sometimes it'll record a show even when you told it not to.
If CableCARD wasn't so damn flakey, I'd go ahead and upgrade to the Tivo Series 3. For now, I blame much of the nastiest of the Comcast DVR offerings (Microsoft or PlaySkool) on the shit Motorola hardware. At least they enable the firewire output, though it's unusable as a recording source for a Media Center PC since you still need an analog tuner in order to get the channel guide.
Re:Dish in wind storm (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Mount them on the side if you can. I've never had problems from wind. Now severe rain can cause rain fade problems, but wind shouldn't if you mounted the dish correctly. It takes a lot of force to create significant flexing of a 3 inch piece of steel pipe that's only three feet long....
Re:Rich CEOs talk only to other millionaires. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The greatest story ever written (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Solution is Clear. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear Hear!
I remember the cable company calling me up shortly after I'd moved into a new place. I'd not automatically called them up to turn my co-ax on.
"We notice that you haven't activated your cable yet, sir. We can take care of that right away! What sort of package would you like to have, sir? "
"None. I don't want to watch TV, thanks."
Confused silence. (I really think that the sales guy had never contemplated life without cable before.) Then, "Why not?"
"Because TV sucks and people who watch it are losers. --In the sense that they are losing out on hundreds of hours of life every year, missing out on personal growth, and falling behind in their mental development. Have you noticed how so many people act like adolescents in their thinking patterns until well into adulthood and beyond. I don't want to be a loser."
"Oh."
"Do you watch TV?" (I was feeling perky and pesky.)
"Um, yes."
"You might want to reconsider your life. Have a nice day!" Click.
The amazing thing is that TV really wants to be in your life. I had to bat away offers and pressing arguments from friends, and in the end, the cable company just ended up providing free cable even though I didn't want or ask for it, (and certainly didn't pay for it.) Luckily my life had become so robust and interesting with all those extra hours filled with actual living that it was very easy not to turn the crack-tube back on again. These days I don't even own a television set.
Most poignant memory with regard to TV: Walking home one night and passing a three story apartment complex with virtually every window flickering that creepy blue TV light. It looked like a damned Borg cube, an analogy which, I thought, worked on several levels.
Beware the Zombie Nation.
-FL
Re:ComCast alleged customer service (Score:5, Insightful)
You got it all wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, let's qualify "evil". A lot of people (probably not you, but just to get it cleared anyway) have this "Black and White" idea that "evil" means being on a self-destructive quest to cause as much pain as possible, fuelled by pure hatred towards your fellow man. Unfortunately those don't really get ahead in the real world.
RL "evil", especially of the corporate kind, is really just Sociopathy, a.k.a., Antisocial Personality Disorder [wikipedia.org]. And indeed there seem to be a lot of them in management, and especially CEO positions. [fastcompany.com]
These are people who, simply put, don't give a flying fuck about their fellow man. You're an NPC to them. They don't hate you, they just don't care. They might harm you if it provides some momentary entertainment, and they think they can get away with it, but just as well they might pretend to be your friend if it helps them get an advantage that way.
They also tend to be people who can (A) read others perfectly, and (B) fake any feeling convincingly. They can look hurt when they need to look hurt, shed a tear when that gets the emotional message across, or sell you logging rights in Sahara with the most sincere look on their face. They could tell you to do something that will ruin your life with a perfectly straight face, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. Why not? You're just an NPC to them. You don't matter.
Just as an example of lying with a straight face, a lot love to reinvent their past as something that milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
And my take is that it isn't money that turns people into sociopaths, but the other way around: in the race up the corporate ladder, these guys have a natural advantage. And in the race between corporations, the one without principles or scruples will have the lower costs and get ahead.
If being rich changed someone that way, then he probably was thinking that way long before. All that's changed now is that he feels powerful enough to drop (a part of) the mask and act like the asshole he always wanted to be.
In a sense, we even expect them to. The idea that a corporation should have no other goals or responsibilities than making more money, at all cost, is, well, just saying that said corporation should act like a sociopath. Unfortunately, a corporation is nothing more than a bunch of people, and its decisions _are_ taken by people. So if we expect corporations to act that way, and put our money on those which act that way, we're pretty much asking them to be led by sociopaths. Or if they aren't, we'll sell their shares and move our money to the ones who can act properly antisocial.
Re:Comcast Is Deluded (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me is that this is increasingly accomplished by forming cartels and pressure on lawmakers to make sure that nobody can emerge who offers better service.
Re:here is a similar story (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters talk only to other slashdotters. (Score:1, Insightful)
A widespread misconception. It is in fact possible to be rich without being evil. However, you do have to be either a spoiled brat or a flaming (though non-evil) asshole. And the first alternative is only available to those in line for an inheritance.
(the converse isn't true, either.... you don't have to be rich to be a spoiled brat, a flaming asshole, or evil).
Re:White Alert (Score:3, Insightful)
Something about the cable company was bad enough to send enough people crazy.
Management decided that this was not good.
So they decided to come up with a process to deal with people who go non-linear in your office?
Wouldn't it have been better to fix whatever the company was doing to drive them insane?
Re:Comcast Is Deluded (Score:5, Insightful)
<sarcasm> Well, it's only a monopoly because of Government regulation, if the Government would just take the shackles off and go to a laissez-faire [wikipedia.org] economic system all of the natural monopolies [wikipedia.org] of the world like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner would magically disappear and be replaced by a healthy competitive marketplace where the consumer would win. Because the free market solves everything, from broadband access issues in rural areas to feeding the straving children in Africa.</sarcasm>
(Sorry, had to beat the free market trolls to the punch.... there goes my karma for the week....)
Re:The Solution is Clear. (Score:2, Insightful)