Listen to Comcast torture Ryan Block and Veronica Belmont as they try to cancel service

Didn’t you want 105 Megabits per second? 'Cos from what I heard, onlyComcast could offer that?

Is this shit even legal? I mean, you have a contract that can be cancelled at any time by either party. Once you call and tell them that you want the service cancelled immediately and you aren’t interested in taking an exit survey, are they legally obligated to terminate your service even if you hang up as soon as they say anything other than “Let me process that”?

Obviously you would need to be crystal clear, and have a voice recording, and tell them that you had the recording, but I would like to know if you are actually obligated to receive confirmation of your cancellation even if they try to exploit you like this.

I’ve never had that much trouble cancelling service (although I have never had comcast), but I have usually only done it when moving, so it only takes me 2-3 go rounds to convince them it isn’t worth their time to go any further.

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You are allowed to be as obnoxious as you can muster to end this. They are wasting your time after all.

“LALALALALALALALA I can’t hear you.”

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I feel like the solution would be to get one of those old extremely shrill whistles and blowing it as hard as you can into the phone whenever they try this bullshit, followed by “now that I have your attention, cancel my fucking service.” Repeat as necessary.

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@Xeni, i’d like to cancel my BoingBoing account, is that something you can do for me?

###Nemesis and Hubris strike me down for my trolling comments!

I’m abroad. Norton Automatic Renewal has just drained my bank account down to slightly overdrawn, two days before I can get a flight back home. I’m actually not able to get to the airport unless I busk or something. F$$k!

But at least they just took the money (and doubled the subscription charge) without interacting with me…

I just had a fun conversation with Norton Antivirus along the lines of “can we persuade you not to cancel?” “No, I’m stuck in a foreign country and you’ve taken the money that I would would need to ride the bus to get to the airport”

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One of those few times that the use of the weasel-passive voice works for you.

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Surely that cannot all be due to Comcast’s absence?

I think that suddenly shooting the adjacent call-centre guy is a little extreme, but ymmv.

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Won’t somebody think of the rep?

This poor guy’s desperately asking “But why won’t you sleep with me?” and does not understand that “Because I don’t want to” is the answer to that question. The chump believes there must be an underlying cause for this lack of desire and fails to recognise the primality of it. It’s quite touching, really.

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I feel sorry for the rep’s significant other: if he’s like this about a cable subscription I can see that when the inevitable happens the SO will be needing witness protection before he lets go

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Comcast doesn’t consider itself bound to tell the truth. It isn’t entitled to the truth. I’m leaving the country is an answer. Or “I’m dying” is another. After all we are all dying… cheers.

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"Can I ask you why you want to cancel?"

Sure - the voices in my head are telling me too… they say other things too. Right now they’re saying baaaaad things about you…

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Your anger and hyperbole and then mentioning of Iraq and Afghanistan is an overreaction. Which is ironic. If you’re so angry over two little words…

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Just jam an ice pick in your ear for 10 minutes, you’ll get the gist of it.

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That’s my usual tactic with anything like this. I’m not using the whole category that your product is just a piece of. That gets me off very quickly, as they have no where to go. But… it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that you either have to lie, get rude, or endure this kind of crap.

It’s hard to imagine this guy still has a job today, but more important would be for Comcast to deeply examine the type of customer retention policy that led this zealot to these extremes of behavior.

But forget that. I bet you $100,000 Comcast will not do that. Because, they are the worst. And somewhere on some awful spreadsheet is listed some metric that shows if they treat their customers aggressively and petulantly during outboarding, they will retain some percentage. And ultimately that is all they care about! Which is why they are the worst and, despite all those on demand channels and fast download speeds, why we hate them. We know we are disrespected. We can feel it with every interaction.

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What’s interesting here is that the rep is actually A.I. Dude has been talking to a computer. Response time for snappy answers is amazingly short. Hal 9000.5 has learned to use the colloquial “so”, and “I mean”, and “like”.
The billing must continue until long after the customer’s death. This is the goal.

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This guy that called in, Ryan Block, is a product manager for AOL. Its hilarious!

Just imagine Gilbert Godfried as one of the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

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