And the Comcast laughs just keep coming

Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. We received a notice in the mail today from a collections company informing us we owe Comcast $740 for unreturned equipment. You know, the same equipment I've been trying to return to them for two weeks now. On the day we fired their sorry asses I was transferred to the 'pick up department' where I spent 52 minutes on hold with these fools. They never got back to me so the pickup was never organized.  There's a limit to how long someone should reasonably be expected to remain on hold and I reached it. I figured if they wanted their stuff back they would come looking for it in their own good time.

And so yeah, I gave the stinking DVR to my friend Jessica. Ironically, she is one of the three Comcast customers in the contiguous United States who has not had any drama with this company. It's especially ironic if you know her since she's a walking definition of a customer service department's worst nightmare. (Love you girl!)

So she calls her buddies at Comcast to explain how she got the DVR and to have it switched over to her account. What do you know, they have no record of the Schwinds, who live two miles from her, ever having had a Comcast account. Nope, don't know those freaky folks, so sure, go ahead and keep that DVR they tell her.

With steam coming out of my ears (remember I'm still dealing with our local phone company who keep charging us thousands of dollars for a service we don't have with them), I call Comcast customer service and proceed to lose the plot with them over the collections note.

'Oh I deeply apologise', says LaShawntell, (I'm not making that up), 'I can help you with this. I can get someone to come out and get that stuff for you, don't you worry'.

She puts me on hold (oh God, please not the Comcast 'on hold' treatment again). But she comes back after a blessedly short time and tells me 'we don't have no record of you having an account with us. You sure you have a Comcast account? What you say the last 4 digits of your social was again?'

Oh, my bad LaShawntell, sorry, yep, you're right, I was just joshin' with ya. Never mind! 

Dear Lord. She puts me on hold again and when she comes back she says 'Oh, I found y'all. Your service was disconnected so that's why you wasn't showing up. I see here you all have a technician scheduled to come to your house and do some work. I can get him to pick up the equipment when he comes to your appointment.'

Me: ???????? Um, why do we have a technician scheduled to come to our house?

LaShawntell: Says here they coming to do some outside work at your house.

Me: Outside work? Will they fix our fence? It's falling down. Because since we don't have a Comcast account, there's no work they could possibly be doing for us 'outside'. It would be great if they could fix our fence though.

LaShawntell: (crickets chirping).

Ultimately, it turned out she was unable to schedule someone to come pick up the equipment after all. She could put us on the schedule for a pick up but she couldn't guarantee when it might be. Not even a vague, ballpark idea of the day or week or month. I mentioned that I would not be sitting around waiting for a maybe pickup on some random maybe date but if she liked I could just bundle everything up and leave it on the porch.

Maybe it would still be there when they eventually came to collect it. Or maybe not. Hard to say really.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's adventures in Customer Service Hell when I try to physically return the equipment to an actual Comcast location myself. Hey, maybe I'll walk out with a cheque for $740.