Subtitle: How evil is Comcast, really? The Background: In June of 2003, I opened an account with Comcast cable for cable television and broadband internet services. At the time I ordered the account opened (by phone), I received no indication that I needed to provide a billing address at the time I placed the order. When the technician came and installed the service, I gave specific instructions that the bills should be sent to my PO box address, as anything sent to the service address would not be received. At that time, I was given no indication that that information would not be passed along, or that I needed to give it to anyone else in order that it be put into effect. Time passed. I didn't receive any bills, but in the midst of my life during a typical summer, I simply didn't notice. Then came early August. I gathered up all my bills, paid two months in advance for the ones that made sense to do so, paid up the rest as appropriate, and left town for a month. Three days into my trip, I received a voicemail from Comcast saying to call them to discuss an urgent billing matter. I called Comcast from a campground in New Hampshire. I was told that my account was in arrears. I told them that *IF* I had received a bill (I couldn't honestly remember whether I had or not) I would have paid it, and if they sent me one in time to reasonably expect it to be paid by the due date (four days later than that conversation) then I must have paid it. I patiently explain that I'm away from home for a month, I do not have the bills in front of me, and I will not expect to be able to do anything at all about it until I get home around the end of the first week of September. That was 11 August. Fast forward to early September. I'm still on the road, maybe in Austin, maybe on the way there. I get that same voicemail from Comcast. I ignore it. I'll be home in a few days anyway. I arrive home on 8 September to find a disconnection notice on my door. The service had not yet been disconnected. I call Comcast to find out what the deal is, and they tell me they haven't been paid since the installation. I check my records, and find out they're right. The only conclusion I can draw is that I never received the bills. I'm not in the habit of losing my bills. If I get 'em, I pay 'em (assuming they're legit). So, I report that I had not received any bills. They check their records, and it turns out they were billing me at the service address. When I mention that I specifically instructed the technician that I would not receive bills at the service address, I am told that I needed to say that when I placed the order. I complain that if I am never given this information, I cannot reasonably be expected to act upon it. Eventually, I suggest the possibility of paying the bill by credit card, over the phone. Note that *I* had to suggest this. I pay the bill, get the billing address corrected and request an itemized bill reflecting the services for which I just paid and confirming that all late charges had been dismissed. I am assured that the disconnection order is cancelled, and all is well. That was 11 September. 13 September: I come home from work to discover that my cable modem will not let me connect to the Internet. I call Comcast to find out what the trouble is and get it fixed. I get a youngish sounding female tech who very tentatively asks me if there's been a death in my family. A death in my family?! No, why? Well, the computer says the account is closed because you're dead. The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. (Thanks, Mark Twain!) Anyway, I'm not dead, so can I get this turned back on? Sure, no problem, I'll see if I can catch the tech, and I'll call you back later today to confirm everything was put back. OK! Finally! Someone who seemed not only to be nice, but also willing to fix things and follow up to make sure it was done right. (I'm guessing they've fired her by now.) Later that day all was indeed restored. Fast forward three weeks. 1 October: The cable modem is out again. I call Comcast. They insist I go to their service center and show some ID. I, in turn, insist that they have screwed up, and they should connect me with whomever it is that has the authority to fix what they've done. After getting VERY pissed off over the next hour and a half, I finally get connected with someone who wont tell me her full name, insists that her job title, in full, is "Senior," and tells me that I have to go to their service center and show some ID to prove that I'm not dead. After another half an hour or so, she finally asks me enough questions about the account information to satisfy herself that I am who I say I am. She even asks me for a code to be placed on the account to insure that all orders placed with regard to that account are authorized by me (as the only person with that code. I won't even go into the flaws in that idea.). I ask how this could have happened and she assures me that there is absolutely no way that Comcast could have caused my account to indicate that I was deceased, so someone must have gotten my account information and called them and told them that I was dead. As far as I'm concerned, this is less likely to happen than three separate meteors converging on different trajectories to knock my earring out while I sleep. I demand assurances that this fiasco is concluded. Naturally, the only response I get is that if I'd paid my bill it wouldn't have happened in the first place, and she tells me the service will be turned back on by a week later, but she'll call me back to let me know if she is able to expedite the reconnection at all. She calls me back later, and tell me oops, it was on our end. Someone hit the wrong key. Anyway, the service should be back on the next day. While we're talking, the service comes back on, but she doesn't have any information about why or how. Naturally, this inspires such confidence in me that I spend another twenty minutes trying to get some kind of assurance that this won't happen again. Talk about banging your head on a wall. It is now 9 October (well, it was when I started this sordid tale) and here in front of me is a bill from Comcast. Note that I never received a statement detailing the charges I paid on my credit card, but I did get this bill, for ** $425.73 **. Yup. $425.00 for "unreturned equipment" plus assorted monthly charges, taxes and fees. Naturally, I have no intention of paying this bill. I will call and bitch someone out hardcore, but I just have to ask: If I don't pay the bill for the equipment I didn't return that was used for the account that was closed because I was dead, will Comcast still turn it over to a collection agency, and will it show up on my credit report? I can't wait to tell this to a judge when I sue Comcast. What a bunch of fucking idiots.46 responses total.
They didn't ask for a billing address when you set up your account, and you didn't find that odd? You didn't receive a bill for three months, and you didn't find that odd? True, the "dead" thing was pretty stupid, but you probably should have been more responsible about keeping track of which bills you had received and which ones had never shown up. As you said, in the shuffle of summer, you lost track. That's not their fault. Our phone bill was almost two weeks late, and I was on the phone with Ameritech by day 14. I can't imagine waiting three months or wondering if a bill had shown up or not without calling the company to check on it.
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1: The time period for which I didn't see a bill was from the first week of June through 8 August. During that period was Summer festival, during which times I was working every single day from 9 June to 12 July, and was quite busy in the weeks after as well. I had just moved into a new apartment on 29 May, and was still trying to get settled in amidst my work schedule. So, between a severely interrupted routine and a demanding work schedule, looking for unreceived bills was not topping my priority list. In addition, I was not familiar with the billing cycle for this service, and didn't know when in a given month I should expect a bill. Lastly, when I ordered the service, the conversation was pretty much limited to pricing of different service options, where to send the technician and when. When someone asks me my address, I *always* clarify whether they're seeking a service/delivery address or a mailing address. This is a habit deeply ingrained after maintaining a PO Box mailing address for 12.5 years.
Re #1: > You didn't receive a bill for three months, and you didn't find that > odd? I don't know about other, but the extent of my bill paying system is, "when the bill arrives, I pay it." I've never really kept track of what's due when, except for really big items like rent and my student loan.
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I think being abusive to customers on billing issues is an integral part of the cable-TV business model.
My bill paying system to to queue the payment with my online banking to be paid four days before it is due. The Comcast story is "really something". There must be some way to take advantage of being officially, but not literally, dead.
Count yourself lucky, pay the bills and stop calling them. If you insist on being alive when the computer says you are dead, they'll have to send out a technician to fix the problem.
other, you may want to check and see if anyone else thinks you're dead. Seriously, a friend of mine is going through a big credit hassle because he discovered when he tried to buy a car that Social Security had placed his SS number on a list of "dead" accounts. Apparently some illegal was also using his number, died, and got reported to SS. Now my friend can't get any credit, and is having a hard time proving that he is alive. Social Security was a problem even though he had his original SS card to show to them. He's pissed, but working thorough the paperwork, one day at a time to get a credit rating back.
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Re #8: That doesn't sound as threatening when you remember that the technician will invariably show up when you're at work.
Dress up as a vampire, go to the billing office, and demand that they change your status from "dead" to "undead".
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Wrong again, Jamie. That would require making a technician actually perform "work".
re 8: I think the point is that he already paid the $400 they are trying to bill him for now.
Other - I didn't mean any offense. For some reason, I read your login name wrong (I'd been up 40 hours) and thought you were someone I'd been arguing with. I'm sorry. :-P
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No offense taken. I haven't paid the large bill, and when Comcast called me back today about it, they took the charge off and reported that my current balance is now a whopping $10. I'm still waiting for the next screwup.
oh--different mistake? I assumed that they were billing you a second time for the backlog that you had previously paid by credit card. Either way, it's generally a bad idea to pay bills that one doesn't owe, so I still disagree with #8.
No, they were billing him because he died without returning the equipment they installed.
#20 made me laugh. :)
comcast asd time-warner are evil - just get used to it . story here but i will not regle you .. it's in court.
I generally figure that if somebody who's supposed to bill me doesn't, the bill must not need to be paid yet. This is especially the case, since for just about everything I get billed for, the amount varries from month to month (rent is constant, but rent never involves receiving a bill, so it's an exception). For utility companies that neglect to send a bill, or even if I lose the bill, they bill me again the next month, and I pay it. I'm more careful with credit cards, since they actually go on my credit record. I did at one point get into a situation with Pacific Bell where they stopped billing me. That is, they stopped sending me regular statements. Every few months, they would send me a shutoff notice, with instructions to pay some amount of money, which I would pay promptly. Eventually I wanted to order something else from them, at which point they made me spend a few hours sorting out the mess, but the experience didn't make me wish I'd given up those hours to fix their billing problem sooner. It just wasn't worth it; it was their screwup, and there was very little in it for me. That said, in any large company (and even small companies I've worked for) the technical people tend to be pretty far removed from the billing process. If you want to be billed somewhere other than the service address, the person taking the order probably has far more access to make that happen than the installer, and the installer may not know how little access he has (putting something about billing in the notes for the install ticket doesn't mean the billing people are going to be reading the install notes). If nobody says anything else, the service address does seem like a rather logical default.
The place I lived in Bellevue, WA, I had terrible problems with mail delivery. It wasn't until I tried to cancel a gift magazine subscription a family member had given me that I realized the extent of my missing mail problem and started looking into it (in the case of the magazine, I thought I'd received one issue and missed one. It turned out I'd missed the gift card, missed four issues, then received one, and then started missing again..) Since I'm not a person who anticipates when irregularly-scheduled bills are due, and since I was travelling a lot while residing there, the results were not good.
I seriously expect that companies will make a regular practice of screwing up billing, in order to screw people out of late fees or whatever. It's a logical extensnio of all the other shit they've gotten away with in recent years.
Except that they generally seem pretty willing to remove those fess when it is arguable that they're the ones who screwed up, if you go through the trouble of calling and complaining hard enough.
How many companies handle billing mess in a reasonable way?? I've had service issues with almost everyone - Phone, credit card, auto loan, personal loan, insurance. Local companies as well as MNCs like GE, HSBC, Prudential Life. And all suck at customer support.
Re #25: I've always figured this is why the window between when my credit card bills arrive and when I pay them off has steadily shrunk. I've also noticed that some credit cards seem to have eliminated the one-month grace period on purchases before finance charges. I pay my cards off in full every month, yet suddenly one card started charging me finance charges anyway unless I stopped using it so that there were no overlapping charges. I quickly stopped using the card.
Err, I meant to say the window between when my credit card bills arrive and when they're due, not when I pay them off.
I think we should have a funeral for Eric. If Comcast says he's dead, who is he to argue?
Only if I get to attend!
Of *course* you would be invited to attend.
let's skip the funeral and go straight to the wake. Hey, we could have a nice padded coffin for him to lie in if he drank too much and passed out.
Oh, joy!
My dad tells the story of a neighbor of his grandparents, who had been erroniously declared dead while serving as a nurse in World War I. Her family had had a funeral for her before she got wind of it and sent them a four word telegram, "not dead. Will write."
fodder for another anne rice novel .. except that 'blood canticle' is her last in teh vampire chronicles. this story may, however, revive her interst and propel it into 21st century.
Anne Rice said that Memnoch the Devil would be the last Vampire novel, and look how many she's written since then...
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Not anymore. She had her stomach stapled.
(What a pity the surgeon did not staple her lips, too, while he was at it.)
Every Star Trek film since eihter 1 or 2 has been "the LAST one...EVER!! Cross our hearts and hope to beam up!" I think they stopped numbering them after 6 to try and avoid it looking like Nightmare on Elm Street.
(I think they stopped numbering them after 6 because the cast changed.)
Equally plausible (unless your not a conspiracy theorist, in whichj case it's more plausible). They could have solved that problem by calling 'em "ST:TNG I, II, III..."
I think they stopped number them after 6 because they didn't want us to know they were using a base 7 numbering system.
rofflmao.
whorre.
You have several choices: