[conspire] conspire Digest, Vol 145, Issue 1
bruce coston
jane_ikari at yahoo.com
Sun Nov 1 22:15:43 PST 2015
>From a games theory perspective I'm sure Comcast trains to a Strategic Lack of Competence , or maybe just hires cheapest contractor firms . - Bruce
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2015 21:48:29 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing
services
demolished
Message-ID: <20151101044829.GJ5099 at linuxmafia.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Quick: What is the most hated company in
America? The answer depends
on whom you ask, and when you ask it. A few years ago,
Goldman Sachs
topped pretty much everyone's list, for example.
Perennially down in the bottom 10, with special demerits for
abysmal
customer satisfaction, is Comcast Corporation.
In some of the passages that follow, I'm going to
self-censor to avoid
saying unflattering things that I don't want to risk having
to defend in
court about specific identified companies and
individuals. However,
you're free to use your imagination.
My mother-in-law Cheryl, who lives with me and Deirdre, has
long been
frustrated by occasional slowness and perceived outages with
the
household aDSL. Cheryl is fairly technical.
However, like most
Americans, she is strongly drawn to a model of
problem-solving I call
'Complain to the nearest person.' Even though I've
ensured that she is
briefed on how to distinguish packet-routing from DNS and
browser
problems, and possesses a network diagram and list of
relevant IP
addresses, when she perceives a problem accessing Internet
services, she
provides zero help and instead complains. Invariably
to me, and even
after I point out she's impairing diagnosis rather than
helping, that I
am not a trouble-ticketing system, and that she is not my
customer to
begin with.
Our friend Duncan MacKinnon was visiting recently, and
Cheryl complained
to him. Duncan desired to help, and so researched
options for Cheryl to
purchase her own Internet service independent from the
household aDSL,
and his recommendation was Comcast Business Internet,
http://business.comcast.com/ . Cheryl announced
that she would be
signing up for this service out of her own pocket, offered
to let others
in the household use it, and wanted to ensure that I as
homeowner was OK
with this.
I thanked her for asking, reviewed very briefly the
extremely bad
experiences the household had with Comcast that lead to our
cancelling
cable television service in 2011[1], and gave her my honest
assessment
that {EXTREMELY DEROGATORY JUDGEMENT REDACTED} impels me to
politely
refuse to have anything whatsoever to do with that firm.
I added that I had no objection to her having a business
relationship
with these {EXTREMELY DEROGATORY JUDGEMENT REDACTED},
but that it'd be
a cold day in Dubai before I would. So, she could
arrange for them to
do anything she wanted _entirely on her own_, and I had no
objection as
long as they didn't break anything.
[pause]
Friday, I woke up to hear what seemed likely to be the
installer Cheryl
had scheduled. I opened my laptop clamshell. No
bandwidth at all --
not just slow packet transmission. I was reaching to
my server and the
outside LAN, but there was nothing moving across the aDSL
bridge at all.
And the pessimist in me thought: What's the worst the
installer would
do, if he's a real screw-up? Ah, right, he could
somehow take down the
whole AT&T landline, which carries both voice and our
packets to Raw
Bandwidth Communications's DSLAM in AT&T's local central
office.
I walked to the nearest landline telephone: no dial
tone. I checked
the other landline telephone: no dial tone. I
walk into the living
room, say 'Looks like the AT&T landline's totally
dead'. The installer
standing nearby, one Timothy Almacer, installer for Comcast
contractor
OC Communications, http://www.occom.com/, immediately went
into full-on
'I didn't do it' mode.
I stressed to Almacer that I'm not his customer but I _am_
the sole
owner of this real estate, and that his firm was in trouble
with me.
I interrupted his I-didn't-do-it performance piece to get
more details:
It turned out that Almacer had decided to run entirely new
coax from the
telephone pole to the house. It also turned out that
Deirdre and Cheryl
had no knowledge of this, or any other detail of what
Almacer had done,
because they had not supervised his work in any way.
Both of them were
just passively sitting in their chairs.
Almacer asserted that his firm had no culpability and that
it was just a
total coincidence that the AT&T line had worked
continuously since at
least the day we moved in, nine years ago, but broke the day
he was
pulling cable next to the AT&T line. Almacer
wanted me to walk out with
him to the sidewalk so he could show me that the attachment
points of
his vs. the AT&T cable near the telephone pole were more
than 10' apart.
(I made no comment, because that fact is utterly irrelevant,
and said
merely that I was busy doing root-cause analysis.)
Almacer said he'd spoken to his supervisor, whom he
identified as 'Josh
F', and gave me this person's telephone number,
916-539-6630. (He
refused to give Josh F's full name.) When I reached a
break point in
triaging the problem, I called this person. He again
refused to give
his full name, but reiterated Almacer's line that his firm
had no
responsibility for the downed landline. He reiterated
that it was a
coincidence, and said 'This happens all the time.' I
said I did not
accept this, and was calling seeking an alternative to suing
his firm.
He had nothing useful to add, so I ended the call.
I went into the garage with a ladder and a landline
telephone, found
and opened the AT&T demarcation point box, and
identified where two
landlines were connected on the customer side. I
temporarily unplugged
both connections' customer-side RJ-11 jacks (so that nothing
was
connected on the customer side), and plugged the telephone
into one of the modular jacks. No dial tone.
This proved that the
problem was on the AT&T side of the demarc point.
It was now about 11am. Deirdre used cellular data
service to open a
trouble ticket with AT&T, who promised a repair visit
before 8pm.
A second OC Communications pulled up, and the driver
introduced himself
as Josh F. He repeated his offer to show me how far
the two cable
attachment points are from each other near the telephone
pole. I again
made no comment: The two cables converge as they cross
through the
trees and are very close at the garage entry point.
Obviously,
something Almacer did was extremely likely to have taken out
the AT&T
landline, probably far away from the telephone pole. I
said to Mr. F
that, if he wanted to do something useful, he could verify
with his
lineman buttset telephone (which has alligator clips) my
test result at
the AT&T demarc point. He did so, and pronounce
there to be no dial
tone.
Mr. F asked me if I wanted to cancel the installation.
I repeated that
I was not the customer, just the real estate owner, and
didn't give a
tinker's damn about the installation, only about the
breakage. I
referred him to Cheryl as the customer. He repeated
the question to
her. She said no.
First Mr. F left, then Almacer, with me saying I in no way
accepted the
absurd claim that the AT&T breakage was totally
coincidental, but that
it would be imprudent of them to touch any AT&T
property, so I saw
nothing useful for them to do except get off my land.
Just after Almacer went out my front door, I noticed that
he'd left the
aDSL bridge unit for Cheryl's connection in the middle of my
living room
underneath one of my chairs, with the AC power connection
daisy-chained
off a power strip and the power cable stretched across the
living room.
I opened the door and called to the departing Almacer,
asking him to
please put the unit somewhere competent like in the corner,
not under a
chair with a fire and trip hazard power cord across my
living room
floor. He called back some excuse about the power
strip being the only
convenient access point to power, and suggested I fix
it. Rather than
saying 'Don't you have _any_ pride of workmanship?', as the
answer was
obvious, I just turned back inside and moved the unit to the
obvious
place in the corner, with its own power feed.
Around 3pm, an AT&T truck arrived. This guy is
good. He already had
remote diagnostic data from the central office, indicating a
short
circuit on the telco side. I showed him to the demarc
point, and he
quickly verified no dial tone. He traced the cable,
found it to be
damaged, and said he'd run all-new cable, which he
did. 1/2 hour later,
we had landline voice telephone and Raw Bandwidth
Communications data
back, solid.
I spent the next several hours trimming trees all around the
several
overhead cables so that no foliage is near them. That
was a long day.
Roll forward to today. I turn on the TiVo. I
noticed yesterday evening
that the TiVo was indicating "Searching for signal on:
Antenna In. See
'Messages & Settings' / 'Troubleshooting' for info", but
thought nothing
of it. I checked both of the TiVo's tuners: Both
were indicating no
antenna signal.
Back in August 2011, when we terminated with extreme
prejudice the
household Comcast account in order to go with over-the-air
and Internet
television instead, we paid the best antenna guy in Silicon
Valley, AV
Solutions Pro of Mountain View, to implement the best
solution. The
proprietor studied the problem, then installed two outside
antennas, one
pointing at (IIRC) Mission Peak, Fremont, and the other at
Sutro Tower
in San Francisco. Signals from both go from the roof
to coax cable,
then under the house to the office where the television and
TiVo boxes
are.
I guess the breaking of that service at the time Comcast's
subcontractor
OC Communications visited was just coincidence.
Certainly, Timothy
Almacer would not have, say, incompetently disconnected the
antenna's
coax cable to steal it for his aDSL run, right? I
mean, it would be
cynical to even think that.
So, I guess _three_ services spontaneously broke during the
Comcast / OC
Communications installation visit. Totally
coincidental.
I'll bet it 'happens all the time.'
We are likely at this point to avoid having any other
Comcast or OC
Communications personnel cross my property line. I am
likely to pay
good money to have AV Solutions Pro come back and
repair the damage,
and Deirdre has e-mailed him with that request.
I wouldn't want OC Communications to visit, and, say, my
house burn
down. I'm sure it'd be totally coincidental if that
did, though, and
it's possible that that happens all the time.
{EXTREMELY DEROGATORY OPINION AND REFERENCES TO IMPROBABLE
BIOLOGICAL
ENGINEERING FEATS REDACTED}
[1] http://deirdre.net/getting-rid-of-cable/
http://deirdre.net/cable-the-final-insult/
http://deirdre.net/cord-cutting-antenna-ho/
http://deirdre.net/on-the-funding-of-television/
http://deirdre.net/why-television-pricing-is-broken/
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 01:03:35 -0400
From: Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [conspire] One service visit, three existing
services
demolished
Message-ID: <56359D27.3000301 at mrbrklyn.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
On 11/01/2015 12:48 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> What is the most hated company in America?
Microsoft, followed by Apple, and Facebook. Honourable
mention to the
NY Yankees, Rite-aid, cvs/caremart, your health-issuance
conglomerate
which goes by whatever name it does this week.
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 00:03:42 -0700
From: Tim Utschig <tim at tetro.net>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [conspire] One service visit, three existing
services
demolished
Message-ID: <20151101070342.GA23669 at tetro.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
On Sun, Nov 01, 2015 at 01:03:35AM -0400, Ruben Safir
wrote:
> On 11/01/2015 12:48 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> > What is the most hated company in America?
>
> Microsoft, followed by Apple, and Facebook.
Honourable mention to the
> NY Yankees, Rite-aid, cvs/caremart, your
health-issuance conglomerate
> which goes by whatever name it does this week.
2015: #1: Comcast
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/07/23/customer-service-hall-of-shame/print/
2014: #2: Comcast
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/07/18/customer-service-hall-of-shame-3/print/
Makes me feel bad for switching from Raw Bandwidth to
Comcast
Business just for more bandwidth. Two
Netflix/Youtube/etc. users
in the house at the same time on a 3 Mbps DSL link made it
too
difficult to work from home. Still, no excuse. I
did a bad
thing and I should feel bad.
AT&T sales people dropped by several times over the past
couple
years. They each claimed fiber* was recently installed
in our
neighborhood. Each time I asked how much bandwidth
they were
offering. All but the latest time they said 17 Mbps.
The most recent time a nice, straight-talking AT&T sales
person
came by and told me I could get 45 Mbps** for less than what
I'm
paying for Comcast Business. They'd also allow 30 days
to
try it and cancel without breaking the contract.
I'm not sure how I feel about AT&T, but I'm sure I feel
better
about it than Comcast. Ideally I'd pay Raw Bandwidth
for layer-3
service over AT&T-managed layer-1/2. Hopefully
that will
be a reality someday, but I'm not holding my breath.
* Fiber to Somehwere in the Neighborhood. Some type of
DSL for
the last mile, presumably.
** Coincidentally, 45 Mbps fiber to the home is what we
were
promised (and paid for) in the '90s:
http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
--
Tim Utschig <tim at tetro.net>
408-644-3861 (mobile)
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2015 01:03:11 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [conspire] One service visit, three existing
services
demolished
Message-ID: <20151101090311.GA9959 at linuxmafia.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
It gets worse: I figured out exactly what happened to
the television signal.
Picture here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CStmJH1UsAAa6Qo.jpg
Let me share a small epiphany I had, that helped me reach a
new
pinnacle of extreme annoyance:
Comcast's subcontractor deliberately sabotaged the
antenna gear we
installed in 2011 for the sole purpose of firing
Comcast.
Seriously. During one installer visit, three services
were sabotaged in
total (landline telephone, existing aDSL, and antenna
television feed),
and the third of those was the one we _paid for to get rid
of Comcast_.
Think about that one, for a minute.
As mentioned upthread, in 2011 we paid excellent local
company AV
Solutions Pro $400 to install two cutting-edge rooftop TV
antennas, so
we could dispense with Comcast cable television
service. The two feeds
of 75 ohm RG-6 coax cable join and traverse the roofedge to
the far side
of the garage, then go through the water meter box to inside
the garage,
and cross the garage ceiling to the crawlspace door.
There, inside the
crawlspace, AV Solutions Pro joined the antenna feed to an
existing
underfloor coax cable network running to three indoor
terminations, in
the living room, the office (where we have the TiVos and
large TV
monitor, and the master bedroom.
Now, imagine yourself a subcontractor installer for a firm
like Comcast.
You visit a house, and decide to run new coax cable from the
overhead
telephone pole to the garage. The customer (Cheryl)
said she wants the
aDSL bridge unit inside the living room. You see
existing TV antenna
feed from the roof through the garage to the living room,
and note that
it reaches the living room. Score! Do you...?
1. Ask the customer what to do, or
2. Run cable ~40 feet to the living room, _or_
3. Cut the antenna cable just outside the water meter
box, and then
steal & repurpose all inbound cable just
to avoid having to run
40' of coax.
Guess which one he did? That's right, he could see
plain as day that he
was slicing and disabling the whole antenna system, and just
did so
without permission or discussion.
If you would never presume to grab an entire house cable
network
without asking 'Is this avalable?' first,
congratulation: You
disqualified from being a Comcast subcontractor on grounds
of excessive
business ethics.
This covert theft of the entire network of underfloor coax
has left me
in a quandary:
There is zero point in wasting the entire underfloor coax
network
on one aDSL feed to the living room. To create that
feed, the bozo
robbed us of ability to have television signal in _any_ of
the three
previously supplied locations. I believe two solutions
are possible:
1. 'Put it back, fool.' Reconnect the
antennas to the existing
cross-garage cable and subsequent underfloor cable
network. Then,
after that remedial re-creation of our 2011
we're-firing-Comcast setup,
separately run a _new_ cable run from the garage to
the living room.
This should probably be around the garage and patio
roof-edge to the
living room and through the outside wall, a run of
about 40 feet,
which is what the bozo _should_ have done on Friday.
2. Concede Comcast's theft, and instead run all
new cable from the
garage room to the crawlspace, under the floor to (at
least) the office.
This is much, much more work than option #1, and with
less satisfactory
results. (Without runing a -lot- of underfloor
cable, we end up with
television signal at only one indoor location.)
So, I expect it'll be option #1 -- which amounts to 'pay
someone
competent to un-do the Comcast's subcontractor's sabotage,
reconnect the
antenna feed competently, and then independently do the
fresh cable run
to the living room that Comcast's idiots should have done'.
It burns me that these sabateurs are getting _paid_, and now
we get to
pay to undo the damage they did.
I've considered requiring OC Communications to come back and
do it right
at their expense. The problem with that is that I
would rather not
trust them to do anything more challenging than, say,
picking belly
button lint -- and am presently disinclined to let them
cross my
property line until some time after the heat death of the
universe.
Some longer-term lessons:
1. Modern houses are complex systems, and any visiting
contractor needs
to be closely supervised. 'Closely supervised' means a
local insists
on hearing in details what work will be done, understands
it, is
competent to judge whether this is what is wanted, and then
watches
the contractor like a hawk.
2. Cheryl did none of that; she punted. She also
understood roughly
nothing about the existing house cabling. She was
surprised when
Deirdre explained to her today about cabling from the
antenna to the
TiVos: She never really thought about how the
television signal
arrived. She knew nothing about what was being done
and how; she knew
only that magic Comcast packets arrived at her computer.
3. I expect that your typical Comcast installer has
all the competence
and due diligence of a drunken frat boy.
I'd advise not letting one set foot on your property, ever.
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
conspire mailing list
conspire at linuxmafia.com
http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire
End of conspire Digest, Vol 145, Issue 1
****************************************
More information about the conspire
mailing list