Thisabove pictured pile of cables is but the beginning of Glen's magicalmystery tour into the wonder of having a Comcast contractor installcable...
                        
                  "They took apart one of our phone jacks in our office room for some reason and left it hanging."

Ourstory begins with the sales call. It was a door-to-door salesman, andafter going through everything I was satisfied with what was beingoffered. I made sure that everything (except one thing, and that wouldcome back to haunt me) was written down. All the fees being waived? Inwriting, each listed separately. Cost? In writing. I filed away thepaperwork and waited for the installation. Having read aboutinstallation horror stories (on the Consumerist), I decided to stayhome and supervise the installation that Comcast was going to be doing.It's a good thing I did.

                                                                                                                                       
                        
                          The rest of the wall jack was left on the desk.

8/7/2007 - Installer shows up. He is a Comcast contractorwith the company J&L Cable. As I start to talk to him about things,he interrupts me and asks to see where all the cable jacks are. I takehim around, showing him where they are all, and then taking him to theoffice room, where a jack needs to be installed. Remember that onething I didn't have written down? Yeah, that's it. He says almostnothing until the tour is over. Then he tells me that he couldn't putthe jack into the office room, because he was  not allowed to. I askwhy, since the salesperson specifically told us it would be no problem.He tells me that it would require him to drill through walls orfloors/ceilings or he's have to wall-fish, and "We don't do that". Weargued back and forth, and he told us that the Comcast salespeople weredishonest, and that they'd tell us anything they needed to in order toget us to sign. There was nothing he could do. I told him that I wantedhim to write that down on his installation form. He looked alarmed fora moment, then started over, this time adding an example. "See, if wedo that we could end up in the same situation we ended up in last weekat another unit here - when I drilled through the floor it ruined thecarpet." I told him that if he did the installation there then he mustbe allowed to do it, but he said no, he wasn't allowed to. I asked him"what about last week?", and he said they never do it.

                           
For some reason they took our long cable and replaced it with one that barely reaches the television. I have to replace it now.

Thenhe changed tactics on me. Don't underestimate the slyness of theComcast Installation Tech. He tells me that he couldn't put the cablemodem into that room anyway. Why? Well, he described "it's called VOICEOVER IP, and the cable modem has to be close to a phone jack so that wecan pipe the phone back into the system..."I interrupted him at that point and told him I knew exactly what itwas and how it worked. Then I told him that there was a phone jack inthe room. He then said the whopper: "Yes, but a cable modem is verysensitive to where it is physically in the house, and you'd end uplosing too much signal there and lose your phone." This will becomefunnier later.

                          
                                                          They clearly spared no expense here.

Hethen says something that makes my fiancé almost blow up. He says hedoesn't think we're keeping our current phone number. What? Then whydid we sign this form authorizing it to be ported? When I asked to seehis paperwork so I could find a phone number to call that he was inover his head. He called a "supervisor" and asked him to come by toexplain it to us.When the supervisor arrived it quickly became apparent that they could do a jack installation, they just didn't want to.
When a gigantic cable box was brought in we told him that we weresupposed to get one of the small ones. He replied that the FCC bannedthem and that there was no way to get one. It was FEDERAL LAW. Later inthe installation I called Comcast directly and arranged to trade thebig one in, the look on the supervisor's face when the Comcast CSRasked to talk to them was pretty good.
When I made them check the signal strength of the line at all thejacks it turned out that we had more than adequate signal in all ofthem. He was surprised at how strong it was. As they were never goingto agree to install the jack as promised, I decided to have theminstall the modem in the loft. The loft is physically the furthestpoint from where the cable enters the condo, and the line is split acouple of times before then. But cable modems like lofts (they justdon't like offices), so I guess we're good.
I constantly walked back and forth between the two techs, watchingwhat they were doing. I saved many of our more breakable items, as didmy fiancé. The younger (first) tech seemed to have no idea that he wastrampling things and knocking things over. Despite our best efforts,the techs did some damage. There is now a gouge out of the front of ourTV screen, and grease and dirt all over one of our walls.

                           
                                                            This is after a first washing.

Whenthe techs left it was up to me to run some Ethernet cable down to theoffice. I put my PC on the modem, and found that it didn't work. A callto Comcast technical support led to a number of hilarious "answers"."We don't support home routers" (I wasn't using one yet). Sir, you needto shut down your PC, unplug it from the wall, and then turn off themodem. Won't I lose my call to you if I unplug the modem? Yes. The nexttech I talked to told me that all I really needed to do was hit thereset button. It worked.After finding the internet not working, I decided to testeverything else. I already knew the phone worked, so the only thingleft was the cable. Everything was fine until I tried to use the OnDemand. An error message came up that said there was a communicationsproblem and to call the cable operator if it continues. I tried acouple more times, then called. They told me they would have the sametechnicians sent back since the installation wasn't complete. A whilelater the younger tech showed up in a huff. He was not happy to be backat all. He checked a few things, then pronounced that it must be "lowfrequency". I asked him if he meant low frequency interference. Heexplained to me, in his best Tech Talk, that as a signal passes down acoaxial cable that the frequency decreases, and this must be theproblem. This is nonsense, but I was not going to argue the point withhim. He said he would have to try it elsewhere in the house. Fine, butwe wanted it in our living room. He said we might have to live withoutit if we wanted the box in the living room. I made it clear that itwould be in the living room, but that we could test the other rooms asa troubleshooting step.
The On Demand did not work in the bedroom, but did work in the loft,but only after he changed a loop cable on the back of the box. Now thatwe'd found the problem, we went back to the living room, where we foundthe problem persisted.
He stated that we'd just have to have the box there. I told him noway. He then went on to explain that when they wired the house theymust have brought the wire in to the garage, then run it straight up tothe loft (bypassing the living room floor and the floor the bedroom ison), then split it and run it down to the bedroom, then split it againand run it down to the living room. That's why the frequency was higherin the loft.
After some more discussion he gave up and told me that he'd have tohave a supervisor figure it out, and that they'd stop by tomorrow.
The next day my fiancé looked over the damage and decided that shedidn't want them back in the house. She called Comcast (in tears) tocomplain about the whole process and to address the television damagein particular (the Tech had hit the front of the television with thecable box, gouging it - thankfully it wasn't the screen). Comcast nowclaims that they are sending a "real" technician out.
Now we come to billing. The Techs left a sheet that told us our nextpayment would be $242. How could that be, if all the fees were waived?When we asked Nancy (a CSR), she claimed that we were being billed forthis period (it's August 8), next period, and the period after that.Also, the fees that were waived - well, Nancy explained that they can'tbe waived. The FCC "requires" them to charge us a $29.95 phoneactivation fee - it's another of those pesky Federal Laws. Another CSR(Helen) first told me that the fee would be waived if I had paperworkthat said it was waived, then, strangely, refused to comment on thebill after that, and would not stop talking no matter what I said.
So what have I got right now for signing up with Comcast? I've gotworking internet (and it works very well), a working phone, partiallyworking cable, a gouged television, a wall that will likely requirepainting (at least we could clean the grease and dirt out of thecarpet), and billing disputes looming on the horizon.

                          
Wespecifically told him we didn't want the box on top of the television.If we leave it here it will slide down the back and into the wall.

Ican say that my experience seems to be better than some of the one's onyour site - at least the Installation tech didn't try to murder me...August 9th: Remember how they promised to send a Supervisor out tofigure out why the cable didn't work? Well, he never showed up. Goodthing we went ahead and made the appointment for the Comcastrepairperson to come out.
August 10th:
As I said before, the J&L contractors never showed back up aspromised. We had made a repair appointment anyway, and he showed uptoday. This experience was far different. First, he showed up on-time.We talked a little bit, and I explained what had happened, and he askedme if it was J&L. I was surprised and asked him how he knew, and hesaid, "Well, there's really only two companies, and..." He clearlydidn't want to badmouth anybody - which I can understand and respect.He was surprised at the damage they did - when he saw the gouge in thetelevision all he said was "Oh, nice."

                     
                                        This is the gouge that was made in the front of the television.

Iwas pretty happy with him, he knew what he was doing, and didn't try tomake up anything. And there was to be no compromises. "I'll get itworking - there's only so many things that can be wrong." It took himan hour, but he found it and fixed it. Years ago, somebody had workedon the cable wiring and put a couple of filters in the line. The onlyline that didn't have a filter on it was the one going to the loft,which was the only one that worked. He removed the filters and puteverything back the way it should be.So far he's the only person at Comcast who provided a goodexperience. He didn't make up things, he didn't make excuses, he waspolite and he did a good job. I hope we run into more like him as wetry to have the damage the contractors did. As it stands I'm going tohave to do some work to clean up the wiring, but they'll have toaddress the television, possibly the wall, and make sure the bill isright.

Moral of the story: Comcast returns excellentshareholder value by outsourcing and subcontracting to boobs, whileretaining a smaller force of actually trained professionals to clean uptheir messes.