[sf-lug] Why I'm not a huge Comcast fan (2015 incident)

[Rick Moen]

Michael Paoli encouraged me to re-tell this story that I posted at the
time (when I was hoppin' mad, curbing my tongue a lot, but on the edge 
filing a tort action in S.M. County Superior Court) onto CABAL's 
Conspire mailing list.  Here it is, with a very few fixes.


Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing services demolished
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Date: Sat Oct 31 21:48:29 PDT 2015

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 problems 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 as 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 wake up to hear what seemed likely to be the installer Cheryl
had scheduled.  I open my laptop clamshell.  No bandwidth at all --
not just slow packet transmission.  I am reaching to my server and the
outside LAN, but there is nothing moving across the aDSL bridge at all.
And the pessimist in me thinks:  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 traffic and our aDSL
packets to AT&T's local central office.

I walk to the nearest landline telephone:  no dial tone.  I check the
other landline telephone:  _no dial tone_.  Uh-oh.   I walk into the
living room, and say 'Looks like the AT&T landline's totally dead'.  The
installer standing nearby, one Timothy Almacer, installer for Comcast
contractor O.C. Communications, http://www.occom.com/, immediately goes
into full-on 'I didn't do it' mode.

I stress to Almacer that I'm not his customer but I _am_ the sole
owner of this real estate, and that his firm is in trouble with me.

I interrupt his I-didn't-do-it performance piece to get more details:
It turns out that Almacer had decided to run entirely new coax from the
telephone pole to the house.  It also turns 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 asserts that his firm has 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 wants 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 make no comment, because that fact is utterly irrelevant, and say
merely that I am busy doing root-cause analysis.)

Almacer says he's just spoken to his supervisor, whom he identifies as
'Josh F.', and gives me this person's telephone number, 916-539-6630.
(He refuses to give Josh F.'s full name.)  When I reach a pause in
triaging the problem, I call this person.  Josh F. again refuses to give
his full name, but reiterates Almacer's line that his firm has no
responsibility for the downed landline.  He reiterates that it is a
coincidence, and says 'This happens all the time.'  I say I do not
accept this, and am calling seeking an alternative to suing his firm.
He has nothing useful to add, so I end the call.

I go into the garage with a ladder and a landline telephone, find
and open the AT&T demarcation point box, and identify where two
landlines are connected on the customer side.  I temporarily unplug
both connections' customer-side RJ-11 jacks (so that nothing is
connected on the customer side), and plug the telephone 
into one of the modular jacks.  No dial tone.  This proves that the 
problem is on the AT&T side of the demarc point.

It is now about 11am.  Deirdre uses cellular data service to open a
trouble ticket with AT&T, who promise a repair visit before 8pm.

A second O.C. Communications truck pulls up, and the driver introduces
himself as Josh F.  He repeats his offer to show me how far the two
cable attachment points are from each other near the telephone pole.  I
again make 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 say to Mr. F.
that, if he wants 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 does so, and pronounces there to be no dial
tone (as I already knew).

Mr. F. asks me if I wanted to cancel the Comcast service activation.  I 
repeat that I was not the customer, just the real estate owner, and 
don't give a tinker's damn about the Comcast service activation, 
only about the breakage.  I refer him to Cheryl as his customer.  
He repeats the question to her.  She says no.

First Mr. F. leaves, then Almacer, with me saying I in no way accept 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 see
nothing useful for them to do except get off my land.

Just after Almacer goes out my front door, I notice that he'd left the
cable 'modem' 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 floor, _directly across a walking path_.

I open the door and hail the departing Almacer, asking him to
please put the unit somewhere competent like in the corner, not under a
chair as a fire and trip hazard power cord across my living room
floor.  He yells back some excuse about the power strip being the only
convenient access point to power, and suggests I fix it.  Rather than
saying 'Don't you have _any_ pride of workmanship?', as the answer is
obvious, I just turn back inside and moved the unit to the obvious
place in the corner, with its own power feed.


Around 3pm, an AT&T truck arrives.  This guy is good.  He already has
remote diagnostic data from the central office, indicating a short
circuit on the telco side.  I show him to the demarc point, and he
quickly verifies no dial tone.  He traces the cable, finds it to be
damaged, and says he'll run all-new cable, which he does.  1/2 hour
later, we have landline voice telephone and Raw Bandwidth Communications
data back, solid.


I spend 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 check both of the TiVo's tuners:  Both are 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
Solution Pros 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 antennas 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
O.C. Communications visited was just coincidence.  Certainly, Timothy
Almacer would not have, say, incompetently disconnected the antenna's
coax cable to steal it for his cable-Internet run, right?  (_And_
severing the AT&T landline?)  I mean, it would be cynical to even think
that.


So, I guess _three_ services spontaneously broke during the Comcast / O.C.
Communications installation visit.  Totally coincidental.</sarcasm>

I'll bet it 'happens all the time.'


We are likely at this point to avoid having any other Comcast or O.C.
Communications personnel cross my property line.  I am likely to pay
good money to have AV Solution Pros come back and repair the damage,
and Deirdre has e-mailed him with that request.

I wouldn't want O.C. 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/





Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing services demolished
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Date: Sun Nov 1 01:03:11 PST 2015

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
Solution Pros $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 roof edge 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 Solution Pros 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 
cable Internet 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, option 3.  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 available?' first, congratulations:  You're
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 cable Internet 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 running 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 saboteurs are getting _paid_, and now we get to
pay to undo the damage they did.


I've considered requiring O.C. 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 detail 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.




Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing services demolished
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Date: Sun Nov 1 01:26:50 PST 2015

Quoting Tim Utschig (tim at tetro.net):

> Makes me feel bad for switching from Raw Bandwidth to Comcast
> Business just for more bandwidth.

Well, picture how steamed I have about these {CENSORED} now having an
ongoing presence on my property.   Not happy.  Not happy at all.
But that will remain a relationship between that company and Cheryl, 
which will mean I have no dealings beyond knowing that a consenting
adult and a consenting corporation are having relations I would not.

I've made clear that no representatives of that firm or its contractors
may cross my property line again without my explicit permission for any
reason whatsoever.




Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing services demolished
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Date: Sun Nov 1 18:11:13 PST 2015

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us):

> During a home remodel thirteen years  ago I was cabling the house with
> CAT-5 and coax and decided to install a communications box out near
> the street so that the box would be the point of demarcation between
> service providers and my home. Thanks to the guy you shave, and
> others, I knew I did not want Comcast or other lowest-bidder,
> out-sourced technicians traipsing around my house drilling holes,
> etc., in a manner most expedient to _their_ interests, not mine. The
> result is that I have an explicit point where I can verify service and
> signal quality and only I or my trusted technicians work on house
> cable/infrastructure. The box handles voice (telephone + Raw Bandwidth
> DSL) and cable (TV) and is connected to the house via a 2-1/2 inch
> conduit so I can add cables at any time if needed.

Damned fine idea.

By telling Cheryl I would not stand in the way of her choices, and would
not object as long as nothing broke, but that I personally would have
nothing to do with Comcast because Deirdre and I consider them
{ASSERTION OF FACT THAT I'M NOT PREPARED TO DEFEND IN COURT REDACTED}, 
I ended up getting the worst of both worlds:  

1.  I wasn't involved, because I sought zero contact with Comcast.
2.  Cheryl was accountable for oversight, and responsible to me for
    ensuring that my interests weren't hurt, _but_ was unable to
    carry out that role, and unaware of her failure.

So, by the time I first woke up on Friday and immediately diagnosed
AT&T landline outage, all the damage had already been done.  It was all
over but for the stream of contractor bullshit self-justification and
smokescreening.

Needless to say, I will keeping any and all future visiting contractors
on a tighter leash, and holding that leash personally.

Something I heard from Cheryl earlier today that I found interesting:
She said (1) installer Timothy Almacer of O.C. Communications had asked
her no questions about anything, and (2) Almacer had failed to answer a
number of questions she had asked him.

Please note carefully that last point.

I said, 'Wait, you were his customer.  You asked him a series of
questions and he just blew you off?'  'Yes.'  'When he blew you off,
what did you do?'  'I went back to my desk.'

What the actual frak?

Hey, wow, my mind was duly blown.  _She's_ the customer, he blows off
her supervisory questions, and the result is she goes back to playing
computer Sudoku and he gets to do whatever he wants without her even
knowing what he's going to do?

This strikes me as unclear on the meaning of the word 'customer'.  He
was working for her, but she allowed him to treat her like his flunky.
I cannot imagine permitting this.

And in fact I did not:  After I awoke and announced a few minutes later
in the living room that the landline appeared to be suddenly broken, 
Almacer repeatedly told me he wanted me to walk out to the sidewalk to
observe how many feet apart the Comcast and AT&T overhead attachment
points were on opposite sides of the telephone pole.  I considered this
for about half a second and concluded utter irrelevancy, _but_ I did not
waste my time debating this with Almacer or explaining why I wasn't
going to do that -- because I was clear on my not working for this
idiot.  Instead, I said 'I'm busy doing root-cause analysis' and ignored
him.  I later ignored the same inane and irrelevant suggestion from
Almacer's boss Josh F., replying 'If you want to do something useful, 
use your lineman's buttset telephone to verify my finding that there's
no dial tone at the telco demarc point.'  Which he did, him working for
me rather than me the homeowner working for some shlub subcontractor.

Anyway...

If I had been the customer and the contractor ignored my questions, the
next thing out of my mouth would be 'Stop.  This job may not proceed
unless we get some things straight.'  And, if the contractor gave me
significant backtalk or did anything else but stop, I would order
him/her to leave.  Job cancelled.  Done.

Because he's not the boss.  You're the boss.

This supervision, the entire necessary customer-in-charge role, utterly
failed.  I need to make sure the opportunity for that failure never
arises again.

> In other work I do on homes I always tell the contractor that I'll be
> watching the installation and will need to discuss the proposed
> installation with them before proceeding with the work and while
> working. (In other words, I want to know what their plan is.) 

Exactly.  My house, my rules.  If the contractor doesn't like that, the
property line is that-a-way, and kindly don't disturb the habanero
peppers on the way out.

We have top antenna installer AV Solution Pros of Mountain View
scheduled to visit Tuesday to un-do O.C. Communications's sabotage of his
2011 work, which per se would also leave Cheryl with no Comcast cable,
so I'll ask him if he can also do that work competently as it should
have been carried out last Friday.  If he's not OK with that, we have
others who can.





Subject: [conspire] One service visit, three existing services demolished
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
Date: Tue Nov 3 15:18:37 PST 2015

I wrote:

> We have top antenna installer AV Solution Pros of Mountain View
> scheduled to visit Tuesday to un-do O.C. Communications's sabotage of his
> 2011 work, which per se would also leave Cheryl with no Comcast cable,
> so I'll ask him if he can also do that work competently as it should
> have been carried out last Friday.  If he's not OK with that, we have
> others who can.

We're all done, now.  

Arden from AV Solution Pros saw the severed antenna feed coming down
from the garage roof, and not one but _two_ cut-off cables going inwards
from there, in addition to a third to which the inbound Comcast cable
was connected.  It's still a little unclear exactly _what_ Timothy
Almacer of O.C. Communications (the Comcast installer) did  -- let alone
why -- but in retrospect it's apparent he sliced the antenna cable
_pointlessly_, because he didn't use any of it!

Wow.

Arden used a toner-signal unit and receiver[1] to verify which of the
two cut coax cables goes to the office room housing the TiVos and large
monitor, then reconnected the antenna to that.  Arden didn't need to
touch any part of Comcast's setup.  So, no need for the second guy from
Comcast to visit.

After Arden respliced the antenna cable, we verified TV signal is back,
Cheryl verified that Comcast cable Internet still works, we called the senior
Comcast installer tech to say his services were no longer required, and
we were done.  Cheryl paid Arden $100, and Arden's invoice saying 'Work
to reconnect antenna cable cut by Comcast installer' got PDFed and sent
to Comcast Loyalty Dept., who had already promised to reimburse Cheryl
whatever AV Solution Pros charged for the repair.

Why were there three coax cables inbound from the edge of the garage?
Not sure.  Moreover, I currently don't care.  Speculation:  It may be
that long coax lines, originally for cable television, _all_ the way
from the three indoor rooms ran to the water meter box.  That would be
stupid and wasteful, but as such within expectation.  Maybe Almacer saw
three lines, knew he wanted to use one but wasn't sure which, cut the
antenna line to simplify his life (at our expense), used to a toner to
determine which cut line lead to the living room, and spliced into it
for his use.

I could have insisted today's scheduled Comcast installer visit and run
new cable to the living room so we could preserve the ability to
activate antenna TV in the living room -- but can't imagine us wanting
to do that, so fine.  So, we were done at 2pm rather than 6pm, with no
need to let Comcast come back.  Win.


[1] It's common to find where cables go using a combination of a tone
generator and an inductive amplifier.  I have a pair of these for such
uses.  (Arden has a pair specialised for coax cable.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_generator#Pitch_generators_and_audio_generators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_amplifier