My colleague writes a good-as-any explanation of why we’re not getting quite as much energy work done in the past week as we’d like.
What happens when economies of scale are taken to ridiculous proportions? The wretched customer service of Comcast, AT&T, Etc.
We recently had to move our Institute for Local Self-Reliance office within Minneapolis due to our old building being razed shortly for student condos. Given the paucity of choices, we are stuck with Comcast as our ISP (the other option is a slower, less reliable CenturyLink DSL connection).
Dealing with Comcast for the move has been a reminder why communities are smart to build their own networks.
…After settling in, we called Comcast to figure out what equipment to send back to them and make sure we were only being charged at the new location.
Helpfully, when we supplied our “old” account number to the CSR this time, they were able to instantly tell us what the “new” account number was. Any illusion of progress was shattered when they insisted that they had already turned off service at our new location because they thought we were moving out of the location we had service at for 7 days to the place we had service at for years.
…Sure enough, they shut down our service the day after I wrote this. In the midst of a staff meeting we were doing over Skype, we lost our connection. After a few minutes isolating the problem to Comcast’s network, we called them. They informed us that we hadn’t paid our bill by its due date.
Read the rest of the story here ->
