My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend.

First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him and that I had been on a promotion, but would not do anything to tell me whether I was still on the promotion or not, or whether I could get on a new one if not.

When I called the local service center the next day, during their listed business hours, I navigated fully through the phone menu, only to find out they were closed during their listed hours.

I wrote an email to Comcast complaining about this. I received three “responses” from them before I received one that was vaguely helpful. The first two said useless things like, here are more service centers near you (where by near they mean, you could drive to them), and yes, their hours are what you said and they haven’t changed. The last one proffered the lame suggestion that maybe (maybe? why don’t you just call them and find out?) they were having a meeting.

Maybe they were, but their message should be changed to say “We are temporarily closed, please call back in X hours.”

I ended up getting another live chat representative who was a bit more helpful, but the whole experience has lowered them in my eyes from “pretty good customer service” to “on the whole rather annoying to deal with”.