I’ve written before about my struggles with Comcast — they lose payments, they bill incorrectly, and until recently, calling their general customer service from my cell phone was an exercise in frustration because they would redirect me to New Mexico Comcast based on my area code.

When closing my account with them, I had another struggle: they told me they would send me a final bill, but they didn’t issue the bill before the due date on my previous bill or before the account was closed. When I talked to them, they seemed not to be aware that I had ever been promised such a thing, and maybe not even aware that I had called to cancel my account (even though my account should have shown that I had canceled as well as returning my modem — another poor experience, since it took 30+ minutes while everyone in the place moved at molasses-speed).

Eventually I had to sit on hold on their online chat for a while and request that they tell me the final balance. One representative claimed I should just pay the full amount due and they would refund the balance, but I’ve heard that song and dance before and I didn’t fall for it. To quote myself from March 2008, “Like hell. At this point, they don’t get my money until they prove that they’re supposed to.”

Even after he agreed, he claimed all they could give me was an estimate because they couldn’t calculate the taxes. (Really? How do you do it every month then?)

Today I got a notice in my email that my bill was ready online, so I guess they finally prepared it. I tried to log in to look at it (because the email doesn’t give the amount) and — surprise! — I can’t log in because the account number associated with my login profile has been canceled and is invalid. No, really.

Let’s hope I estimated an amount close to the correct amount when I paid them online. Otherwise I’ll have to wait for my mail to be forwarded to sort this out. (…and I only even get paper statements because they can’t be trusted to send out an email every month.)