The Losin' End of an Xfinity Support Case

It happened again. I had the lovely experience of dealing with a Comcast support person as my digital cable box derped...

Here we go...

Analyst Mandino has entered room (ooh, boy.)

Mandino: Hello Mongo, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Mandino. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Mongo: My Issue: letters dl appear with a rotating line next to it. Unplugged and plugged back in, error code E609 then FR hunt then it returned to the letters dl and the rotating line. Only snow on television.

Mandino: Thank you for bringing this concern to us. I will be more than happy to assist you with this today.

Mandino:  I can’t imagine myself having those equipment issues especially that cable TV is part of my daily routine, no worries, we’ll definitely work on a sure fix to resolve this one way or the other. (wow.. that was really generic and empathetic.  This guy is a bot or is pulling canned text from a command prompt.)

analyst Mandino has left room

Mandino:  That usually occurs when your service is still loading, initializing or dowloading.

Mandino:  We need you to please powercycle your box now Mongo, like unplugging it and plug it back in again after 1 minute. Would that be okay?  (why not just say, unplug it and plug it back in...  Powercycle?!?!)

Mongo: Sure

Mongo: It has been downloading since 7am EST.  (This was in response to his explanation of what the "dl" meant.)

Mandino: : Oh I see.

Mandino:  TI\  (crap, he's a terminator.)

Mandino:  Thank you for that information (oh... so, TI\ is probably some sort of chat autotext command... maybe /TI or TI/  was what he meant to write.  He's not a bot... but he may not be American.)

Mandino:  Lets just do first the power cycle Mongo and lets see if it resolves your concern today?

Mongo: yes. System is now unplugged... waiting 1 minute

Mongo: Plugging back in.

Mandino:  Thank you for cooperating.  (what am I going to do?  Resist?)

Mongo: E609

Mongo: FR 1

Mongo: Hunt

Mongo: DL and circling line

Mandino:  Same message?

Mongo: yes

Mandino:  Have you chacked it back already?

Mandino:  *checked

Mandino: : Oh I see.

Mandino: Thank you for that information. One moment please  (same exact wording as before... must be a quick text command)

Mandino:  Have you plugged it out from the outlet Mongo? (????)

Mongo: yes, unplugged from the wall.  (TIFTFY)

Mongo: It's connected to a power strip which runs to the outlet.. That was what I unplugged, at the wall outlet.

Mandino:  PLease give me a moment Mongo.

Mandino:   I will be more than happy to assist you with this. Just give me atleast 3-5 minutes as I review this concern first. Would that be okay?

Mongo: sure

analyst Mandino has left room (what ROOM?!?!?  Am I on a 90s chat site?)

Mandino: Thank you for patiently waiting Mongo.

Mandino:  After doing some research, In order to resolve this issue, I need to send a signal to your cable box. Please provide me the serial number of that box please. It is found at the top or at the back of it.

Mongo: one second (this lasted ten minutes, because I'm an idiot, my entertainment center is up against the wall, with everything shoved into it... and all of my decorations for Christmas were still up, most of which were plugged in and sitting on top of the entertainment center.)

Mandino:  Just approach me once you are done Mongo. You may take your time and I'll be more than patient to wait for you.  (read:  COME AT ME BRO)

Mongo: thank you

Mongo: There are two stickers on the back. One with just numbers. One with numbers and five X's in the middle.

Mandino:  The one with the X's in the middle please.

Mongo: (hidden number)

Mandino:  Oh Im sorry Mongo, Thats not the one. Im sorry

Mandino:  It should start with "M" or "P"

Mongo: shall I give you the other

Mandino:  regardless if theres an X or none.

Mongo: the other sticker said

Mandino: Yes please. Make sure it starts with "M" or "P"

Mongo: (number hidden)

Mongo: I need to check for the letters

Mandino:  IM sorry but thats not the correct one.

Mandino:  Please make sure it starts with "M" or "P".

Mongo: ok... third sticker

Mongo: (number hidden)

Mandino:  Great!

Mandino:  Thats correct now

Mandino:  Thank you for that information. One moment please

Mongo: good, because I'm out of stickers

Mandino:  hehe. (LOL)

Mandino:  Please give me 1-3 minutes as I will now send the refresh signal to your box.

Mandino:  PLease turn your box on now Mongo.

Mongo: Power button seems to have no effect. still showing the dl

Mongo: so, I'm guessing that it is on?

Mandino:  One moment Mongo.

Mandino: May I know when did this box activated?

Mongo: what year did I receive it, in other words?

Mongo: 2004

Mandino:  Oh I see.

Mandino: Thank you for going through all the troubleshooting steps with me Mongo. At this point, we have determined that the best resolution is for us to send a technician. As promised, I am here to make sure to get you the best resolution for that issue on this chat. I will take care of setting up the appointment for you right now.

Mongo: OK. My wife would have to be the person here when they come, but she is not sure what her schedule is. Monday is a holiday so that is probably a no go.

Mongo: Anytime after 4

Mongo: 4:30 is a good bet.

Mandino:  OKay Mongo. Let me check

Mandino:  Great!

Mandino:  Thank you for that information. One moment please

Mandino:   I will personally take care of this for you but before anything else just for security purposes, may I first have the last 4 of your SSN please.

Mongo: ****

Mandino:  Great!

Mandino:  Thank you.

Mandino:  Before we proceed, I need first to provide you your ticket number for this appointment. Please take note of this. It will be (redacted) Please take note of the following important information regarding your technician’s visit: The technician can arrive any time within the assigned timeframe. Someone 18 years or older must be present at the time of the technician’s visit for the entire duration of the technician’s visit. You must confirm that you will be present for the technician’s arrival on the day of your appointment. You will receive a call from our Automated System to confirm your presence at your residence.

Mongo: ok

Mandino:  We have 4:30- 6:00 on Friday Mongo. Would that be okay to you?

Mongo: would this be January 18th?

Mandino: Yes, January 18th

Mongo: Yes, this would be fine

Mandino:  Great!

Mandino: I am so glad to inform you that i am already done processing here the appointment schedule for you Mongo. To recap, we have addressed this concern by performing a preliminary troubleshooting and by coming to the conclusion that we need to send a field technician to check on this. This concern is resolved on our end.

Mongo: yes, thank you for your assistance

Mandino:  You are very much welcome.

Mandino:  Now that we have successfully scheduled a technician appointment for you, I am more than sure this will be addressed and resolved as soon as possible. All you need is to sit back and relax while waiting for the scheduled visit. We have followed all necessary steps and protocols in dealing with this technical issue and determined the resolution with precision. You may consider this resolved as correct process was undertaken, I made sure of that. I have comprehensively documented and endorsed this concern to the correct support.

Mandino:  Mongo, have I resolved all of your concerns to your satisfaction by scheduling you a technician appointment that will rest assured resolve your concern today?

Mongo: yes

Mandino: Great!

Friday came... and went.  I called Comcast and they informed me that the ticket number I was given listed Michael McDonald as the customer.

I said, "Really?  The guy from the Doobie Brothers lives in my neighborhood?"

I don't think he saw the humor...  Then again, neither did I.  We rescheduled and what started out as a two day fix lasted an entire week.  The tech finally showed up and I was given a new box.  Unfortunately, I lost all of my recordings, including the last two seasons of Supernatural that I had been sitting on, waiting for my wife to watch it with me.

So, I asked the tech about the issue.  What happened was that Xfinity.. Comcast... whatever they are called these days decided to send an update to the TV guide programming that is on digital cables boxes.  This update hosed a lot of cable boxes. 

How nice.  In a way, this was liberating.  The one thing that has been keeping me as a customer has been the fact that I had 99% spaced on my DVR filled.  I was so hesitant the last time I entertained the idea of getting something else, like Direct TV.  I began frantically watching all of my recorded shows in the hopes that I could clear them out before the guy showed up.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get Direct TV because I have four trees in my yard, blocking the direction that the dish needs to face.  I've also been told this was a crap excuse from the guy who tried to install it. 

Needless to say, I'm back to watching and recording, and my box is at a whopping 11%.  But, that will probably change as I get involved with other stuff and the weather gets nicer.  Yeah, right.  What a Fool Believes.

The Internet of Yore! Damn you, Al Gore!

Back in the days when the Internet was still cooling, I learned how to make a webpage. During the fall of 1994, my friend, Deep, which was short for Sandeep, had introduced me to HTML, Unix, and Mosaic. We hunkered down in the University of Pittsburgh computer labs and typed away on a PICO editor through Unix on PCs till the wee hours of the morning. The result of our hard work was an amazing sight to behold. I had successfully created a page that displayed my name, a picture, and a couple things I liked. Now, In today's society, that would be 2 minutes with of programming and seen with as much awe as a refrigerator wall hanging. That is, if it were somebody else's child. My child will be an exceptional artist, in my mind. Yes, she will dazzle us with masterpieces done in her favorite medium, Crayolas.


However, for a college student who has just been introduced to HTML with no previous training, it was pretty neat. This internet thing is pretty cool. Prior to this my experience with computers were mostly a one sided interface. Growing up in the 80's we were taught Spanish and Math on Apple II's. There was no internet the way it exists today. In my three years of high school, I was exposed to local BBS groups through a 2400 baud dial up modem. Of course, it was certainly not cutting edge technology. I would sit there hunting and pecking around on my brother's PC running DOS 5.0 while gold monochromatic characters burned out my retinas. Personally, I felt it inferior to my Apple IIc with built in 5.25" disk drive that I could hook up to a television set for big screen viewing. Hey, man, I didn't have to boot up a prompt and type in a string of letters and slashes to get things running. I just popped in a disk, hit the power button and I could play Beach Head II and Hacker and Lemonade Stand in blazing 15 colors with in minutes. I was enthralled with the black and white text adventures of Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy. There was no worry that I would hack into NORAD and try to start a nuclear war with my Apple IIc. Alas, technology moved on and that old computer just gathers dust in my parents' house. I started the transition to PC's in college after surviving the Apple and Mac attack in high school. I briefly renounced PCs when I first started college because I felt that the Mac OS was simpler and allowed me point and click functionality that our computer lab PCs lacked.

Of course, what did I know? It's not like I was using those Macs for anything special. My friends and I would get a hold of a list of FTP sites from around the world and we'd telneting to some place weird looking for pictures of supermodels and cars I didn't even know how to email at the time. In 1993, I was starting my first semester of college at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach. Don't laugh, it was a good school and....yeah ok, I went there for the beach, but that's another story. At that time, email didn't even exist in my world and my computer served two functions, doing papers and playing games. When I transferred to Pitt in the Spring, I was suddenly bombarded with all these weird words like PINE, UNIX, and Kermit. I had no clue that computers could talk to each other over long distances, let alone let you talk to the person on the other end of them as well. I had just found out the world was not flat. So, within a year, there I was putting up pictures and links to my favorite sites and surfing the internet for Star Wars pictures.

Soon, my world came to a screeching halt. Mosaic was being given up in favor of Netscape. I couldn't believe it. I had become so comfortable navigation the Information Superhighway with this little browser that I didn't want to give it up. I had begun to really get into creating web pages and even began to promote mine in some search engines. This was quite the blow to my recreational computer time. Still, I soldiered on and found Netscape was just as easy to use and provided a lot more functionality. As HTML evolved and more code was available to help add gaudy looking backgrounds and really disproportionate text and font sizes, Netscape allowed webpages to look more like Stevie Wonder created them with a background in Picasso’s style of painting. Boy, there were some awful pages out there. Here's an example of what I mean, and this guy did this recently. http://www.rogerart.com/ He probably gets a million visitors just from people who have pointed out how bad it looks. Bleeding eyeballs aside it was just fun to create something that could be viewed by fifteen people. After all, how many of us constantly checked our page counters to see if anybody had visited? I still do. There's one at the bottom of the page that tells my I've visited my site 13 times. Apparently, I am the only one who reads this blog and quite frankly, that's probably for the best. I do not claim to be a prolific or awe inspiring writer. My creative ability could be summed up enough with one phrase, "Jack of all trades. Master of none." This is because I have never been formally trained on half of the stuff I do in my life. I learn by doing or by stealing from other people's work. Sad isn't it? If humanity was to be wiped out tomorrow and I was the last living person on Earth, I'd have to learn to walk on all fours and lick myself. Wow, depressed yet?

With the Internet community growing by leaps and bounds my friend Deep decided to let us in on his latest discovery. We were sitting around the dorm one night and he leaned in and asked myself and another friend if we had ever "Chatted" From his demeanor and hushed voice, I thought he was referring to either something drug related or he become British and wondered if we have ever talked. We both shook our heads and he gathered up his things. "Come on, I'll show you." We headed off to the computer lab and loaded up IRC onto our PCs. "Now just start joining channels." There were all sorts of channels, Star Wars, Movies, Music, and Sex....what was that? Immediately intrigued I tried to nonchalantly sneak into that room. If the IRC had a voice you would have heard a thousand voices talking overtop of each other.....and all of them male, constantly asking “A/S/L,” in the hopes of seeing an “f” in the response. I couldn't believe what I had been introduced to. Until now, my dealings with people on the internet had been a one to one ratio through email. Now, I was being bombarded by hundreds of people all wanting know how old I was, what gender I was, and where I was.

Just then my screen went blank. What happened? I just got kicked off by an ASCII cow? I tried to log back on but now my nickname is being used. What the hell? Being unregulated at the time IRC users were sometimes open to attacks by other users who were regular users of a nickname or a channel. If you got in someone's way there were a variety of vicious, yet sometimes completely hysterical, ways to boot someone off the system. I added a few letters to my former nickname and headed back into the #Sex channel to find the SOB that booted me. Next thing I know, I'm being sent a message, not seen by the other users. "Hey, wanna go private?" I was then extended an invite to a private channel where a female user began flirting with me. I began to see what Deep was talking about. We began chatting back and forth and eventually she started getting a little racy with the dialogue . She had all the creative writing ability of a trashy novel and I was eating it up.....Oh my God! I'm a computer nerd. I didn't have much time to wallow in my self degradation. I had to know where this girl was. I threw out the standardized question and when it came to location, she simply said, "Turn around." I swiveled my computer chair 180 degrees to see Deep and three other guys from my dorm floor huddled around a computer laughing, hysterically. Though, it was still a few years away from being accepted into the lexicon of internet slang, I had just been severely "pwned!"

Now armed with chatting, emailing, and web page creation, I set about to completely disregard my collegiate studies and just slack around the computer labs 24/7 printing out blueprints for the Millennium Falcon and adding retina exploding backgrounds to my "All About Me" page. Unfortunately, Pitt did not have an extensive curriculum dealing with web design or HTML, so I was left to sifting through lines of code from other people's sites that I deemed "kewl" and wanted to adopt into my own. My dorm room became a shrine to black and white .jpg print outs and when I graduated java was just becoming the norm in web page design. Once again, the world moved on without me like my Apple IIc to PC and my Mosaic to Netscape. My HTML skills fell out of practice and unfortunately, if I were to get back into creating a webpage, I'd give old Roger Art a run for his money. I still do some HTML work mostly to fix and change a couple things in SharePoint, our newest work application. Unfortunately, there are 12 year olds out there with more knowledge at manipulating and reading code than myself and I've become a dinosaur, a 90's internet culture cliché. I think back fondly on those days when talking with someone meant calling them on the phone or speaking to them in person. Communication is one of the cornerstones of our civilization. Yet, the brightest of our species devise and create new ways to separate us from actual contact, leaving us to hide behind a keyboard and monitor. I wonder if humanity will continue this path towards anonymity and avatars or realize that while the internet is a great tool, it's no replacement for life. Until that day comes, I'll still be trudging around the internet looking for that elusive code to make my name blink. Hey don't laugh; I'm part of the Top 5% of the Web. Take it from me, a member of the HTML Writers guild. It says so on the bottom of my page.