You won the lottery then. The rep you spoke to was at the end of their rope. Their spirit of engagement on behalf of comcast at an all time ebb… barely able to ask the question let alone care about the answer. Something tells me your rep will be happily collecting unemployment insurance soon, slowly healing from the nightmare of working for comcast.
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…and this is why I have satellite. I absolutely HATE comcast with a passion!
In other words, it takes a blood sacrifice to get the minions of the Dark Lord to fulfill one’s request?
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I’ve done this (truthfully), and they did ask for my new address. I declined to give it, stating that I was signed up for e-bill through my bank, and if they DID want to send something final, the USPS would forward it as needed.
I was extremely surprised that this was accepted with no argument. I anticipated they would “need” that address, but they apparently didn’t care.
That’s good. Then the supervisor gets to hear how I will explain to the rep that I will post the recording of this call on a well-read website, unless he now finally disconnects me, and his employer fires him for being such a truly awful person. I will explain that his terrible behaviour towards customers will force me to recommend to as many people as possible to cancel their services with his employer, so by harassing customers he will directly lose his employer customers. That should be good enough reason to fire him. His behaviour is utterly unacceptable, and that needs to be clear to as many people as possible.
While I’ve had plenty of bad experiences with customer services, nothing remotely as intentionally evil and uncooperative as this. Hopefully because this is illegal. It should be. When the customer asks to end the service, they should not be able to refuse to end the service. That makes it coercion. They can verify that the customer is who he says he is, maybe ask “are you sure?” once, and that’s it. After that, it quickly ends up in the realm of theft.
If it is along the line of sacrificing one minion to motivate the other ones to fulfill your request, it could even work.
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How about:
“I’m canceling my account because I’m going to prison for murdering a persistent customer service representative. Next question?”
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I guess “Editor in Chief and founder” of Engadget technically corresponds to “product manager” on an AoL org chart, but it’s kind of a technicality, surely. Slightly disingenuous way to make the joke.
I almost forgot. I have Charter for Broadband and they have monopoly control where I live. So the other day I see this guy climbing the telephone pose and I don’t think it’s a big deal. Then when I go inside I notice I don’t have an internet signal. So I call Charter, and after about 45 minutes of trying to fix the problem he realizes that they have to send someone out. So later when the guy comes out he checks stuff and it all seems ok. He then goes outside and follows the line and goes up the telephone pole, only to find that the other guy that was just there had cut all the lines for some idiotic reason. So he had to splice mine back together. And for that I got $1.33 charge back. That was a good day.
Quite right JH. Unfortunately I need broadband internet, and I have actually contacted Fios and ATT. I got a hold of our rep and she said that the ATT people pulled out of the deal about halfway through the job saying “It’s not profitable”. Outstanding.
This is exactly what I was thinking. The last thing you want is to have them put you on hold or hang up on you.
Learn this frase so you never have to endure this BS and get a prompt cancelation:
“Im moving to europe.”
I’m a HUGE fan of “No, thank you.”. A polite “no, thank you.Please, (whatever your requested action is).” to every inquiry or request usually only takes a couple of repetitions and often works on the very first time. You don’t have to give up or explain your position or entertain theirs or engage them in a conversation you don’t care to have. Plus, it doesn’t make a lowly employee’s day way worse in the way that wasting their time or getting irate or nasty with them does.
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Just tell them that you’re recording the call. It’s amazing how much better behaved they are when you say that.
I just canceled my Comcast cable TV last week, but not my internet. Now, I don’t trust them whatsoever, so I still need to actually check that it got canceled.
That said, my response was exactly that. I literally don’t watch cable TV any more; and I haven’t since the Super Bowl, so I told the guy as such. Since Comcast is a SUPER awesome company, they signed me up for HBO, even though I never actually asked for it, so I ended up watching Game of Thrones until the season ended, but I just did that on my Apple TV.
The conversation was annoying, but polite, and ended within a reasonable amount of time.
What are these property crimes you speak of?
Damn, son, that’s a great idea.
Notification isn’t enough. If Comcast refuses to acknowledge the verbal notification, they keep sending bills. If you don’t pay those bills, they send them to collections agencies, which simultaneously damages your credit rating.
You have to stay on the line. They know this, and that’s exactly why ‘retentions’ can be so damned aggressive.
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Well, I think there’s some small doubt as to whether they’d fuck with you after you’ve cancelled. But assuming they do, I can see how 30 min on the phone could be much less than the time spent clearing up whatever damage they do - e.g. disputing credit card charges and cleaning up your credit rating with proof of cancellation.
Here are the highlights:
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Came into a private, fully gated and fenced back yard without announcing themselves (I was home) and pulled the co-axial cable to “my” (prior owners’) TV antenna out of my brickwork, leaving it lying on the ground (and of course damaging the antenna on the roof as well as the roof)…former owners were original owners and were not Comcast customers, so this particular address had never been in their system;
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Came back without notice or permission and cut the cable so that it was not only lying on the ground but now also with the wires exposed (I had called and complained that the cable was a danger to my toddlers, so this was the retribution);
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At a different location – where the former owners had not been Comcast customers either – parked their truck on our driveway, blocking my ability to get out (on a day I had a radiation appointment, which are only 10 minutes long, so being late was not an option) and refused to move. Left their truck there until they were finished with various jobs at other homes. It’s a wide street, so if parking is an issue on a particular day then tradespeople usually just double-park, so my driveway was not their only option. And especially refusing to move to let me out…that was particularly sweet.
So: trespassing, blocking egress, damages to home…that sort of thing.
