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.