It's "Comcastic" Alright...

If by “comcastic” you mean absolutely ridiculous. For the last several years I (and now we) have been buying internet, cable, and phone service from Comcast….for a pretty exorbitant fee.  Once I stopped working from home we decided to get rid of the expensive phone service since I no longer needed a dedicated work line. Initially we were just going to cut the phone altogether but then decided to switch to Vonage so that we would have both a back-up phone line (which came in handy last fall when my cell phone died) and a number to give out to the public (doctors, credit cards, etc.) that would prevent us from receiving annoying telemarketing calls on our cell phones (because I have found that the Do Not Call list doesn’t work).  So we told Comcast we were cutting our phone service and transferring the number to Vonage.

At the same we were making that switch we also decided we were going to ask for a lower rate for our cable and internet since they had also recently gone up.  We were told—by two separate people—that we would be unable to make any other changes to our account while the number transfer for our phone was going through. Sounds fishy, right? It did to us too (as the customer we should be able to make changes to our account anytime we please). But one very helpful Comcast employee did tell us that we would be able to lower our bill by almost half once the change went through and September rolled around so we went with it (asking her to make notations of the prices quoted in our account).

Cut to today when Jason called back to make those changes and was told (by a less than helpful Comcast employee) first that those rates we had been quoted had expired September 1st (interesting given that the first person told us to call back to get those rates in September) and then that because we had downgraded our services by cutting the phone we were not eligible for lower rates on what we had left (also contrary to what we had originally been told).  Jason told him that was ridiculous and asked to speak to a supervisor. He was told a supervisor would call us back.

UNBELIEVABLE.

Yeah, not so much.

(Image courtesy of barbariangroup.com)

Unfortunately we live in an area where Comcast is really the only cable provider…unless we want to switch to dish. So here is what our plan is—if they can’t, in fact lower our bill as we were originally told, we’re going to maintain the internet (since Comcast’s price for that is actually pretty comparable for similar services through other providers) and we’re downgrading our television to basic cable for $18.95 a month. That means no HD and no DVR but given that a lot of the shows we watch are available online we figure we’ll give that a try and see how it goes. Jason has been wanting to completely get rid of our cable and watch everything over the internet for awhile now but I’ve been a little less sure about it. But given how “comcastic” Comcast is being right now, I’m willing to give it a shot.

I’ll let you know how it all works out.