choosing friends

ah, the platonic friend. we all have someone that we run to when our hearts are broken or when we're feeling confused. recently my such a friend came to me with her story of a recent breakup; her former boyfriend had left her for another. i consoled her with the standard assurances that the guy must have been a fool for passing up on her. after several evenings of saying how dumb that guy was and how she would have no trouble finding someone else, she told me that it was OK if i wanted to still hang out with the guy and his new girlfriend. "wait a minute," i thought to myself, "why would i want to hang out some random guy--especially her ex?" as it turned out, she was dating an old friend of mine. obviously a friend i hadn't been keeping that well in touch with, but still a long time friend whom i valued my friendship with. (i won't use my usual method of anonymizing with randomly selected letters to represent peoples lest their identities be revealed). now normal breakup protocol states that one should stick with the friend that one was most close with. but what happens if you're equally good friends with both? is it OK to still see both, only separately?

comcast, part II

i got a call this morning at 9am from none other than my favorite cable company. apparently i was delinquent in my payments and had to call customer service to rectify the issue. so i called their 800 number and waited on hold for them to talk to me. after getting in touch with an actual person, i was told that i had to pay the previous month's bill. i explained that i was under the impression that i had already activated the automatic bill pay and that they should have automatically billed my credit card. after reviewing my account once more, the customer service guy agreed that i had set up the automatic payment, but it wouldn't go into effect until 7 days from now. so i would still have to give him my billing information or risk getting service turned off for the 7 days until the automatic bill pay kicked in. i told him that comcast already had my billing information and that it was the dumbest thing in the world to have to ask me for it again after i had already specifically set up automatically billing; but rather then further belabour the point, i gave up and gave comcast my info once again. and thus (i hope!) concludes my comcast adventure. for now.

looking smart

someone came up to me today and told me that i looked smart. it clearly did not mean the "neat" or "trim" definition of smart, since i was dressed in an old t-shirt and mesh shorts. the person asked me where i worked, so apparently the person meant that i looked intelligent. i'm not exactly sure how or what the person was able to decifer from my appearances other than the fact that i am asian, but i'll take "smart". i think.

comcast = the worst company ever

this is a long story with little point but to highlight the ineptitude of comcast. you have been forewarned...

one day, i was trying to sign up for automatic billing to pay my comcast bill. i went to comcast.com to try to set it up. comcast.com pointed me to comcast.net to set up automatic bill pay, so i went there and logged in. after logging in, comcast.net actually told me to comcast.com to go sign up for automatic bill pay. beautiful! after bouncing around the two sites for a while a gave up and decided to call 1-800-COMCAST to get someone to help me.

when i called up the number, there was an automated system for signing up for auto bill pay. "great!" i thought, "i won't have to mess around with a customer service agent to do this." when i entered in my number, it said i had to wait for a customer service representative for further assistance. after waiting on the line for 5 to 10 minutes, i explained my situation to the agent. he told me that i might have input my information incorrectly and i conceded that it was not out of the realm of possibility. so i found myself entering my info into the automated system once again; and once again, i found myself waiting for an agent because the system didn't recognize me. when i finally got through to an agent (after another long wait), i told him i was trying to sign up for automatic bill pay, but before i could finish explaining my situation, he switched me back to the stupid machine asking me for my info. could the third time be the charm? nope. i entered my info and was placed on hold once more. as it turns out, the third time is the time that they hang up on you, perhaps due to the excessive amount of time spent on the system. so i didn't even get to speak to anyone.

supremely frustrated, i went back to the comcast.com website and noticed that they had a live chat option. since i like chatting, i clicked on that and was quickly put in touch with a live chat agent. he tried to brush me off by telling me to call the 1-800-COMCAST number to get signed up for bill pay done, but i explained that i had already tried that method. in response, he sent me a comcast.com link to go sign up. i tried clicking on the link, but it did nothing. nor could i select the text to copy/paste it. annoyed, i told the agent how dumb that was as i manually typed in the link he sent into a new window. sure enough, the link he sent to me did not have a signup form--just a generic "comcast is great" page. he seemed puzzled and mentioned that he could click on the link just fine and then asked me if i was using IE. i politely told him that i was in fact, using firefox. silly me, assuming a huge company like comcast would design their site to cater to firefox users. so i opened up IE and went to the site he sent me and sure enough, it worked.

how stupid.