Yet Another Comcast Experience

I had to change the name on my Comcast -- now they call it Xfinity -- account (internet, TV, "landline"). In the pencil and paper days, you would just cross out the old name and put in the new. But that's not how it works nowadays. I didn't want to call the company and be put on hold for a half an hour, and then accidentally disconnected, which happens pretty regularly, so I drove over to the Xfinity storefront on Baseline. Very slick modern spacious venue. You're supposed to sign in on the computer at the front desk, but the computer was down so they just had a paper sign-up sheet -- embarrassing I would think to the employees to have to resort to something as antique as a written list. I noticed that I was tenth in line and I looked around and I saw that there were only two clerks -- they're probably called "technicians" or some other highfalutin' name, but they're clerks. I guessed a forty-five minute wait and I wasn't far off. I had forgotten to bring my cell phone so I couldn't amuse myself with FB or the NYT or texting friends so I looked at the various items for sale and I immediately felt mighty ignorant. There were all sorts of devices that I didn't know what they did, and if I did recognize them, they were described in language that made not the slightest bit of sense to me. One cellphone, for example, offered both CDMA and GSM. Which is probably a good thing, and maybe someone could explain to me what they do and why you need both of them. And would  I want the cellphone with or without the Qi charger? That sort of thing. There were lots of connectors with fancy plugs for connecting one device to another, which is good if you know what you want to connect, and why, and if you have a solid grasp of your ports. So the forty-five minutes flew by and eventually my name was called and there I was at the counter with this young guy with a scruffy beard that looked like his lifetime growth of facial hair. I explained that I wanted to change the name on the account and he got to work. It seems that you can't just change the name but you have to cancel the one account and set up a new one so we went through the "mother's maiden name" thing and "last four digits of your social" and so on. It seemed to go on forever and every once in a while my technician would look up and say sort of mournfully to me "the computer's kind of slow today." While I was with him, two old guys, older than me, brought their bills to the next technician over and said, essentially, "I don't understand a thing about my bill. What am I paying for. What is this charge." Both guys went away mollified by the explanation but both said that they had to figure out how to reduce the monthly bill. And it's a fact that the monthly bill is rather complex. For example, I don't know why I pay a $6.00 monthly "athletic fee" but the clerk explained that it allows the company to televise high school football and small college football games which means that I'd be able to see Cherry Creek play Fairview or the University of Northern Colorado play Mesa College which is something I suppose though no particular advantage to me inasmuch as I'm personally boycotting all football because of the incidence of traumatic dementia. But that's not the point. It took between half and hour and forty-five minutes for my technician to make all the changes and I signed my name several times to acknowledge this and that which I didn't entirely understand and I was about to leave at last, but my fuzzy-cheeked technician gave me a piece of paper on which he highlighted a telephone number. He said, "There's one more step. When you get home, you call this number and they will "activate" your TV and your internet and your telephone. I said, why don't you just call them, or hand me your telephone and I'll call the activator now but he said that wasn't the way it was done -- I had to call from my home. So I went home picked up the telephone, but it wasn't working. No dial tone. Of course it wasn't working -- it hadn't been "activated." The message on the telephone screen was "check tel line," but of course I had no idea how to do that. How did Xfinity in their wisdom and experience expect a consumer to activate an account from an inactivated telephone. A rather large glitch in the system I would think. However, I'm a resourceful guy so I picked up my cell phone and called the number. I got through immediately and went through the sequence of this press 1 if that press 2 but there was no option for activating, so I said, several times, "I would like to talk to a human being" and after a number of iterations and going around the choices from 1 to 5 I got through to a person. I explained the situation very carefully to my new clerk or technician who sounded as though he could be in India and we did the mother's maiden name thing and the last four digits of your social and I was put on hold several times which always makes me very nervous and finally he came back and said that he was going to transfer me to the "activation unit," who turned out to be a pleasant-voiced lightly-accented woman who was all business, but it took her about half an hour to activate me because Tel 2 kept lighting up on the modem before Tel 1 which is apparently not the way it's supposed to happen. But eventually it came to pass. I asked my new friend where she was physically located and she said "the Philippines." So now I'm back in business and it only took maybe three and a half hours at the very most to change the name on the account. Which is much longer than it took to find out why I had a $13.00 charge including a late payment fee on my Traveler's auto insurance (put on hold twice) or why I'm paying for a electronic newspaper subscription but can't access the newspaper on line (on hold three times), where I eventually gave up and canceled the subscription (it had been a long day).