Deactivated cable box

I have has service with you in this house since 1990.  I wanted to upgrade my boxes since they were last switched out around 2010 or so.  No HD.  

I also needed to cancel service at a small apartment I am selling.  More on that below.

I have six boxes.  The main box and 5 other smaller boxes for the bedrooms and my exercise room.  The exercise room is original - at least 10 to 15 years old.  Installed way back in the day before there tv wall mounting brackets that swing out.  So I can’t even pull the tv back to see the model or serial number.  There’s a little device plugged into it with a ball with a flat sticky bottom that affixes to the tv bezel to accept the IR from the remote.

i was told I’d have to pay to get a visit for this, which is a stupid way to treat a 35 year customer.  Otherwise, I have to drive to the nearest Xfinity store - about half an hour away.  So I drove to the store.  The closer store is a franchise store - and by experience, the people there no less and care less than your own stores.  Of course, the third party store is dressed up like a normal Xfinity store to trick customers into thinking they’re getting the knowledge able service that your own people have.  

They gave me just the main dvr HD box and told me to bring back the old box.  When I got there, I asked about the remote boxes which they didn’t give me up front “because there’s a limit to the number of boxes you can have”.  Odd.  What if I have a 9 bedroom house?  2 bedrooms and the family room get no service?

I said well two are kind of flakey.  She looked at my account. Said wow, you have 7 boxes on your account.  I had no idea.

You see, because you guys are looking to save money everywhere you can, you don’t even use Comcast employees to service homes.  You have third party contractors dressed up as Comcast people.  These people go back to their shops, and they aren’t as reliable as someone who works for YOU.  So when they switched out my boxes years ago, they never took the old boxes off my account.  I’ve been paying for their rentals for YEARS.  Yiu can say, well check your bill.  But you encourage people to go paperless.  And when the same charge comes thru every month yiu say well, there’s nothing new, nothing to look at.  While I could have looked, the predicate error was your lazy third party service provider.  Had he done his job, I’d have no problem.

So the rep says I’ll disconnect the boxes you’re not using.  I can see from my screen.  I say fine.

I go down to exercise this AM and get a black screen with a message saying this box is deactivated.  And call this number.  Oh boy.  

The number is like your own number - which is despicable.  Bots only.  And bots with weak AI that can’t address anything other than to say let us reset your system, which is irrelevant to my problem.  I say no. Money repeat the question 4 or 5 more times. T hen they say if you want an agent press 2.  So I press 2.  They ask me to verify my account with my billing info.  I do.  And then quiet.  Not you are third in line,or,s8me such.  No music.  45 minutes later of dead air.  So I hang up.

I go online.  No human customer service number.  You are so proud that you don’t want to talk to your own  customers.  I look at Comcast Corporation.  Same thing.  I call the number on the screen.  Bots. The only way yiu can get to a human is to LIE and say you want to cancel.  Revenue retention?  comcast is RIGHT THERE.  And they’ll want to even sell you more services that you will have trouble with and won’t be able to get service for.

But worse, in  another strange twist in your efforts to cheap out and save money, you’ve outsourced the help line to a third world country where English and idioms make it hard to effectively communicate.  The person there told me that my apt service was cancelled..  Later that week I went to that apt. to clean out, turned on the TV and cable and internet worked.  You know, the cancelled service.

So intake a chance.  I call the store that mistakenly disconnected my box.  And it takes me to a corporate native English speaker.  Wow.  

Then I’m gobsmacked.  They tell me that my exercise machine room box is so old that EVEN THIUGH IT HAD BEEN ACTIVE YESTERDAY, it is too old to be reactivated.  Now what sense does that make.  If your system can provide service to the box, there’s NO REASON why you can’t re-activate it.

Too bad.  So sad.  Have to schedule a service visit!  But good news, our error, so you don’t have to pay for it.

Now I spent a good 6/7 hours jerking around with bots on multiple phone, bots limes on chat, and ESL speakers and got ZERO service that I asked for other than replacing the main box.  Everything up was fouled up.  

it is plain what is a foot here.  This “we don’t want to speak to our customers” comes from the top.  Senior people decided to NOT have email addresses.  And to eliminate human help lines that can only be found if you LIE about cancelling service or get lucky by trying to call the store,

When I went to the store, I waited my turn.  And what I witnesses was shocking.  4 of 5 people approaching customer service representatives were highly agitated and angry about your obvious effort to avoid talking to them and dragging them into stores.  It’s not the fault of the store. SRs, but corporate doesn’t care - they put those poor souls between corporate and the people they intentionally anger by withholding normal customer service.  And I asked my. SR, doesn’t management realize what you have to put up with because of their Epcot’s cutting penny pinching ways?

Yes, and when we complain to bosses or higher up’s, they are told some form of the following “be quiet, shut up, I don’t want to hear it.”

So now I have a service call.  I don’t like people in my house but you give me no choice.  I asked for a credit to my account for the inconvenience, for the excessive time spent on your intentionally non responsive system.  She referred me to billing.  All they’d give me was the charges for the outage.  No courtesy credits.   NOTHING.  You guys have said nothing to me other then [Edited: "Language"] you, albeit in a nice way by the few people I spoke to who are helpless in the face of a corporate policy geared towards providing as little customer service as possible.

And all this in the face of cord cutting.  Why don’t you just tell people to got to heck, just take our internet service and go online?  Because I have a strong suspicion that as many people cut the cord because of lousy service as money savings.