2009-12-10 (Thursday) – Comcast Sucks!

 Life  1 Response »
Dec 102009
 

Comcast Sucks!

OK, just got notified about current months bill from Comcast and it has increased again. I submitted the following request for information via Comcast’s web site:

Dear Comcast,

I'm trying to find out why my cable bills keep going up, even though I have not signed up for any new services.

I have the EXACT SAME equipment in my home since BEFORE Comcast purchased Time Warner cable.  I have the same programming and the same Internet plan.

When I have attempted to contact Customer Service to find out what is going on with my account, I keep getting different answers and no one seems able to resolve the problem.

Case in point:  I was just notified about this month's bill, which is $140.60.  Last months's bill was $122.48.

Again, I have not ordered anything new.

My current feeling is this:  I believe Comcast is exploiting the fact that they have managed to obtain a monopoly for cable service in our area and that they are continuing to jack up prices because of this lack of competition.  

Does that sound about right?

Thank you for any assistance that you may be able to offer.

Gordon Tillman

This is the reply that I received:

Dear Gordon,

Thank you for contacting Comcast. My name is Chris and I will happy to 
help you today. I understand you have questions regarding our recent 
price adjustment.

While the decision to adjust our prices is never an easy one, we believe
our product continues to be an excellent value for our customers.

We listen to our customers' requests for more channels and continue to 
make improvements to the service and entertainment options we offer.  
Many people are unaware that we pay programmers like ESPN and The 
Discovery Channel a per customer fee to carry their shows on our cable 
line up. The Wall Street Journal has reported that programming costs 
have increased 20% per year over the last three years.  

We know that you have other choices when it comes to providing 
entertainment for your family. When you compare the convenience and 
price for a month of cable service to the cost of taking a family of 
four to a movie, we think cable is still a great value. With Comcast, 
there are no agreements to sign. In addition, you can watch different 
programs on different sets at no additional charge, you do not pay an 
extra cost for local channels, and there is no ugly dish on your house. 
Satellite providers cannot offer you these advantages.

If there are any other questions, please feel free to reply to this 
email and we will be more than happy to assist you.

To assure the proper tracking of this issue, we have created the 
following customer service ticket: 189305152

Please refer to this number should you contact us regarding this same 
issue.

Thank you for choosing Comcast. We do appreciate you business.

Sincerely,

Chris
Comcast Customer Care

Assholes! I despise monopolies, especially arrogant f**ks like these.

Hey, it’s Comcastic!

Triathlon Training, day 74

This was a swim day. Had Master’s swim class at Lifetime Fitness at 19:00. Total distance about 2700 m. Next Thursday we are going to be in the big outdoor pool, with wetsuits!

Goodbye American Express

 Life  No Responses »
Mar 042009
 

I just receive my most recent American Express bill. Anytime I receive a credit card bill I go over every line and make sure that I can account for every charge. I found two unexpected items: a late fee and an interest charge. This was really odd because I make it a policy to never carry over a balance on a credit card and I schedule all of my payments electronically via Bank of America and they are extremely reliable.

I did some further investigation and found that the problem was that I had never received last months bill (and so didn’t send them a payment for it).

They probably did issue the statement. I’m sure AMEX is very good about that. And the likely scenario is that the post office just failed to deliver it. No big surprise there (although our local postman is pretty good normally). What bothers me is that AMEX never bothered to let me know that they were expecting money from me. They have my email address. They have my phone number. Instead they just start slapping on charges. And this is to a customer who has never made a late payment, ever!

So I sent in a lengthy complaint via the AMEX web site. And then I went over the last several statements and found every company that billed services to me via American Express. I logged into my account for every one of those companies and changed the billing method to my Amazon Visa card. And after next month’s AMEX bill clears and I pay it, I shall cancel my American Express card and never do business with this company again.

Goodbye Zogmo, Hello Lakota Data

 Life  4 Responses »
Aug 272008
 

Zogmo, the folks that used to own our data center, were aquired by the Lakota Data Center. I just got a call from someone there named Chris. Bad news – they are jacking up our monthly rental from $799 to $1099. That’s about a 38% price increase… yikes!

This is definitely an incentive to pursue the idea of putting the new version of our application on Amazon’s cloud.

Zogmo’s URL used to be http://www.zogmo.com. As of the date of this post, it still works, but I don’t know for how much longer it will continue to be a valid URL.

Lakota’s URL is supposed to be http://www.lakotadata.com/. When I tried it yesterday, I got a shell of a site with a lot not yet complete. Today, it didn’t load at all. Hmmm…is that a bad sign for a data center?

15:10 Update – I did get Lakota’s web site to load:

lakotadata.com

Performance Bicycle Sneakiness

 cycling, Life  No Responses »
May 192008
 

Performance Bicycle is a large retail chain that sells bicycles, components, etc. Their web site is http://www.performancebike.com/. You can be a member of their “Team Performance” club if you like. The cost is $25.00 / year.

On May 18, 2008 at 14:54 CDT I received an email from customerservice@performanceinc.com informing me that my American Express credit card had been charged $25.00 to renew my Team Performance membership.

I was a bit concerned because I did not receive any warning that my credit card was going to be charged on a certain date, etc., so I sent the following email in to their customer support:

Folks I’m a bit concerned about this. I was not aware that this was an “auto renew” account. I did not receive any warning about this. Furthermore, I just logged into the team performance buyers club site and I could not find any place that talked about auto renewing nor give me the ability to de-select an auto-renew option. –gordon tillman

I received this response back from Amber:

Dear Mr. Tillman, The information is posted on the website. http://www.performancebike.com/team_policy.cfm Regards, Amber Customer Service

So I went to the page that she referenced and found this:

Memberships are automatically renewed annually at the fee effective at the time of renewal. Consent to Automatic Recurring Charge–By purchasing your Team Performance Membership or Renewal, you request and agree that we may annually automatically renew your Team Performance membership by charging the most recent credit card you have used with Performance, Inc. The charge will be made within the month that is one year after this transaction. In advance of enacting such charge, we will send notification of the membership fee to the email or mailing address you are providing in connection with this transaction, and absent your notification to us that the charge should not be imposed, we will attempt to charge your credit card. If your credit card is no longer valid for any reason, such as that you discontinued or changed the account or if the expiration date has changed, or if the credit card processing company gives us notice that your credit card should not be used, the charge for the annual membership may not be processed and your membership may not be renewed through this process. Please therefore ask us about renewing your membership if the credit card you provided us is no longer valid (or has a changed expiration date). Contact us also if you wish to opt out of or cancel this consent by calling 1-800-727-2433, Mon – Fri 9am – 6pm EST. Consent to Use of Electronic Signature and Records–By purchasing your Team Performance Membership or Renewal, you are affirmatively consenting to the use of the electronic signature process. You understand that you have the right to have the Authorization provided to you in a non-electronic form, provided however that we may assess a copying fee for sending a paper copy of the Authorization to you. Your consent to use the electronic signature process applies only to this specific transaction and not to any other future transactions. If you wish to withdraw your consent to use the electronic signature process at any time or you wish to obtain a paper copy of this Authorization, please contact us by calling 1-800- 727-2433, Mon – Fri 9am – 6pm EST.

In that block of stuff I see that “In advance of enacting such charge, we will send notification of the membership fee to the email or mailing address you are providing in connection with this transaction, and absent your notification to us that the charge should not be imposed, we will attempt to charge your credit card.”

Well, I did not receive this advance warning or notification. I replied to Amber with the following:

Amber I’m pretty sure that I did not receive advance notification per this term: “In advance of enacting such charge, we will send notification of the membership fee to the email or mailing address you are providing in connection with this transaction…” Note that the above quote came from the policy page that you told me about, term #1. I’m hereby notifying PerformanceInc.com that, next year, if this happens again, I will contact my bank and dispute the charge. I like Performance Bike just fine, but I don’t like being charged without advance notification. Furthermore I’m going to post full details of our email conversation online for the benefit of others who may be concerned or confused about the policies of PerformanceInc. –gordon tillman

Shade Cafe

 Food, Life  No Responses »
May 192008
 

One of our very favorite restaurants is Shade Cafe in the historic Heights area of Houston, Texas.

Every time we eat at Shade, we are delighted by the delicious food, the beautiful presentation, the excellent wine selection, and the gracious and helpful staff.

Here are a couple of pictures I took with my cell phone when we dined there on Sunday. Please keep in mind that the two food pictures really do not do justice to what we were served!

First of all, we ordered a bottle of a light and crisp Portuguese white wine:

Auratus

Mikie had a lamb dish:

Mikie's lunch at Shade

And I had salmon:

Gordy's lunch at Shade

A side note…

You may or may not know that a part of the Heights is “dry”; i.e., no alcohol may normally be sold there. Shade is able to get around this restriction by requiring patrons who which to purchase alcohol join their private club. There is not cost to do this, nor are you spammed or hassled in any way.

Zogmo Datacenter Outtage

 Life  3 Responses »
May 152008
 

We use the Zogmo datacenter in downtown Houston for our companies 8 application servers. At about 11:45 the datacenter went down. I was finally able to get Jose in support on the line at about 12:05. He said that their “core router went down,” and that Lynn Boyd (the president) was working on it. Things should be up in 5 or 10 minutes.

I really want to know why this happened and why there is not some sort of redundancy for this component. This is a datacenter.

Sprint’s ESL (English as a Second Language) Support

 Life  No Responses »
May 132008
 

I got a call yesterday evening while I was at the gym from Sgt. Hamilton at Fort Benning. He told me that Gordy Jr. should be arriving back in the states at about 21:30. I was thrilled. I immediately called Sprint’s customer service to have his mobile phone taken off military suspension so he would be able to use it as soon as he gets off the plane.

The first person I spoke with told me her name was “Iris”. I tried to explain to her what I wanted:

Good Evening Iris. My son is in the Army and is returning from deployment overseas. While he has been out of the country, Sprint put his phone number on military suspension. Would you kindly take it off suspension so that he can use it?

Well it turns out that was too much English for poor Iris, who sounded more like Apu’s wife Manjula. I apologized for bothering her and disconnected the call.

So I tried again about 15 minutes later. This time I spoke with “Michael” (who sounded more like Apu).

Apu (Michael) assured me that he could do what I asked. After about 10 minutes of waiting in silence, I asked if it would be OK if I hung up the phone and would he please just call me back when Jr.’s phone was reactivated. “Yes Mr. Gordon, that is fine.”

Great.

Well Michael did call me back about 45 minutes later to tell me that all was taken care of. I thanked him and went on with my evening.

About 00:30 this morning, Gordy Jr. called from a buddy’s phone to let me know he was back in the states. I noticed he wasn’t calling from his phone and when I asked him about it he said he had tried to use it but it wasn’t working.

I called Sprint customer service again. Keep in mind that now it’s almost one in the morning. This time Freddy took the call. I asked Freddy where he was. He told me he was in Texas. Freddy had Jr.’s phone working in a couple minutes…and tested it before I got off the line with him.

He also told me that if you call Sprint customer service in the wee hours of the morning you are more likely to get someone in Central support (i.e., the United States).

Lesson learned.

Sprint: You need to clean up your act. You’ve got some great technology but you are losing customers and losing money. Why? Go ask Iris and Michael. Oh wait … they probably won’t understand the question…

American Express Phishing Scheme???

 Life  No Responses »
Apr 152008
 

I got a call today on my mobile phone. As I fumbled to pull the phone out of my computer bag, I accidentally hung it up instead of answering it. Not wanting to be rude, I pulled up the call history, noticed that the phone number was 623-492-6031 and the caller ID was Arizona, and dialed the number back.

I was greeting with an automated voice system that said it was American Express. It instructed me to enter my account number.

Obviously, I had no way of knowing if this really was American Express or not, so I just pushed the # button. Eventually a person (Ms. Davis) came on the line. She could not tell me why they had called, but if I would give her my account and social security number, she would look up my information. I politely declined, partly because I still had no idea if this was really American Express and partly because Ms. Davis had a very poor command of the English language and it seemed unlikely that a large and prestigious company like American Express would hire someone like that to interface with customers.

Then I called the customer service number for American Express and spoke with Ms. Jones. She was not able to tell me anything and instead tried to ask me all kinds of personal questions about my employment and salary. Very strange! Oh, Ms. Jones didn’t sound much more literate than Ms. Davis.

So I still do not know if the first call was a legitimate American Express call. And I’m not at all impressed with the representatives of the company that I spoke with today.

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