Bill Roper's Journal

Comcast/Xfinity continues to defy all records for incompetence.

After I placed the order for the replacement set top box to replace the broken one that they sent me to replace my broken set top box, they didn't actually *ship* it. After waiting over a week for a shipment notice, I fought my way through the Comcast menus and got to talk to another agent. She did not know why my replacement box hadn't shipped, nor could she figure out how to *make* it ship. So she ordered another set top box to be sent to me. I once again emphasized that I needed a 4K wired set top box and she promised that was what would be shipped. (The *best* thing about Comcast's approval process for this sort of transaction is that it does not make it possible for you to *see* what has been ordered for you.)

The box finally arrived on Thursday night while I was on my way to Ball State with K. When I got back late on Friday night, I felt that the best thing to do was to try installing the replacement to see if it was the right thing.

It didn't *look* like the right thing. I tried looking up the model number on line, but the *best* thing about Comcast's page showing you the models of set top boxes is that it has absolutely no useful information about what the parameters for the box actually *are*. So let's set it up.

And after going through the lengthy setup process, I checked the resolution and found this was indeed an HD box, not a 4K box. Of course.

For those counting, we have the original failed box, the replacement failed box, the box that did not ship but which seems to be being counted against the boxes on my account, and the wrong box. There are also two working boxes for the other two TVs. This is a lot of boxes.

I tried going in through the chat bot, but it would do nothing for me because of a mysterious outage in my area. Since I was seeing cable (at the wrong resolution) on my TV, I was fairly confident that this was complete bull. Ok, let's try calling the phone number.

(By now, Gretchen was desperately trying to crawl off to sleep. I was not helping.)

After fighting with the phone tree to get it to connect me to an agent ("Wouldn't you like to use our chat bot?"), it eventually put me in the queue and I waited for several minutes to talk to someone who -- almost before we could get started -- pushed the wrong button and connected me to an internal Comcast number that could not help me at all, because it is for technicians. They connected me back to some other line, which then hung up on me because "The store is closed."

I called back, fought with the phone tree *again*, and was eventually placed into an even longer queue to connect to an agent. The first thing I did was give her my cellphone number to call back at. Happily, we were not disconnected, and let another 4K wired box has in theory been ordered.

Of course, it has not yet shipped. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't.

The next morning, they asked me to take a phone survey. So I told the bot what had happened.

You will not be surprised to hear that no one has contacted me about this and I am thinking that it is likely that no one will.

Because at Comcast, our incompetence and your frustration are our most important products!

One problem is solved. One problem is not. Let's see how it goes.

Let's start with Xfinity and the unresolved problem. Gretchen and I went upstairs on Thursday night and discovered that our Xfinity set top box was stuck in a boot loop. I tried unplugging it and restarting it without success. Then I went onto the Xfinity app and started the troubleshooting process where they eventually said that it would take an hour to run the automatic tests and that they'd text me when they were done. I figured that I'd love a text at 2 AM, so go ahead. Gretchen and I used the smart TV to stream some Hulu before going to bed.

There was no text in the morning. The text didn't show up until around 11:30 AM. At this point, I could now try to speak with a tech. After some time repeating all of the troubleshooting that I had already done with the tech, he agreed to send out a replacement box. I emphasized that I needed a wired 4K box, since they have a tendency to ship me wireless boxes (bad, when the TV is as far as possible from the modem in the basement) or HD boxes (bad, when the TV is 4K capable). And nigh miraculously, the correct replacement box arrived this afternoon.

I immediately unboxed the thing, took it upstairs, wired it up, and fired it up. It got past the boot loop problem that I'd had with the old box and then got to the screen with the language selection that you need to make with the remote control.

I grabbed my old remote control, pointed it at the screen, and nothing happened. Well, of course not. I would need to unpair the remote. I went to the Web, got the unpairing instructions, unpaired the remote, pointed it at the screen, and nothing happened.

Ok, I've got *another* *newer* remote in the drawer. Let's unpair that and try again.

Same result.

I asked K to run down and get me the remote that had shipped with the new box. She did and we noted that the batteries were already installed in the remote. This is unusual in my experience. Pointed it at the box and fired. Nothing happened. Unpaired it, pointed it at the box, and nothing happened.

I am *now* beginning to believe, given that the remote already had the batteries installed, that this is someone else's unit that went back to Xfinity after the user experienced a similar failure to the one that I am seeing right now. It was then plugged in, someone said "Hey, it works!", and then boxed it up to send it to me.

Back to the chatbot on the Xfinity app to try to get an agent so I can get a working box instead of the piece of crap that they have sent me. It wants to try troubleshooting (oh, joy!) but then announces that it can't troubleshoot anything because there is a service outage in my area.

I call downstairs to Gretchen, "Is the cable TV working?" Shortly thereafter, she has turned on the TV and announces, "Yes!" I try the chatbot again, get the same response, and when I try to look at the outage map, I am taken to a screen with a header, a footer, and no content.

I pull up the search engine on my phone to get a phone number to call. This, unsurprisingly, gets me a phone robot, which is *insistent* that it needs to text me a link to go to the non-working chatbot. I am, by this point, screaming at the phone, but nothing will get it to relent.

I hang up and call back and just start yelling "Agent" at the phone. It tells me how much simpler it would be to use the chatbot, but I can wait for someone or they can call me back when it's my turn in the queue. Given how well their systems are working today, I decide to stay on the line.

After some interminable number of minutes, a woman gets on the phone and starts running through her troubleshooting script. I am overjoyed. I explain to her how I have tried two different remotes with the TV, have run through the unpairing steps, and the TV does not respond to either. She tells me how the box reads as being fine on her software. Maybe it does, but I explain how nothing happens when using the remote. We restart the box and it still doesn't respond to the remote.

At this point, I ask K to go downstairs and get the new remote that came with the box. It is identical to the newer remote that I hate and -- interestingly and contrary to my previous experience! -- comes with the batteries preinstalled.

It does not work either.

The lady on the phone says that my batteries (the new ones in the new remote, apparently as well as all of the batteries in all of my other remotes) are showing up as weak, so could I please put some new batteries in? Of course, I have no spare batteries upstairs. I try to get K to run down and get some, but older child is now unresponsive, so I go down, fetch the batteries, install them, and the remote does not work and my batteries are still reading as weak.

(I have noticed on various of my TVs lately that the software is *always* convinced that the batteries are weak, leading me to believe that there is a problem with the software. That, or it has been calibrated with the belief that we have installed a Tesla Wall in the remote control.)

The tech continues to insist that the problem is with the remote control, despite the fact that we now have *three* remote controls that the box is not responding to. At this point, I tell her that I have a fourth, unopened remote control downstairs that I can try. I go get the *fourth* remote, *install* the batteries (because new remotes come with the batteries in a little sealed battery package in my previous experience), see that the remote fails.

She then starts trying to tell me how to unpair the older remote. I inform her that this is the newer remote and I have just unpaired it, but I'll try it again using the protocol for the *newer* remote that doesn't have a setup button, since that is the one that will work on this remote.

You may be unsurprised to hear that this did not help.

At this point, she suggested that the problem was with the remote control and that she needed to send me a new remote control.

Dear God.

We now have *four* different -- and two *new*! -- remote controls, none of which will cause the TV to advance to the next setup screen, all of which have successfully finished the unpairing procedure, and I am supposed to believe that a *fifth* remote is the solution to the problem? I explained to her that I did not care what her troubleshooting script says, if *four* different remotes fail to communicate with the set top box successfully, then the problem is with the box being unable to process signals from the remote, *not* with the *four* remotes (two known working) that are all failing to talk to it.

She now agrees to send me a new box.

I emphasize that we need to send me a wired 4K box. We finally complete the complicated dance to approve the order -- as I note to her that there is no way to tell from the information I am given exactly *what* they are shipping to me, which seems like an additional flaw in the process. She says she will attempt to get me a credit against my bill for the afternoon's entertainment, tries to sell me cellphone service which will be more expensive than what I have now, and I finally get off this call.

At some point, we will get another box and we will see if that works.

This is another fine example of the rotten service that you get from Xfinity. Sadly, there are no good alternatives here.

However, the rotten customer service that you get from Xfinity is *light years* better than the customer service that you get from OptumRX.

But that is another story...

My work computer got a Windows 11 update to 22H2 this morning. That was fine.

What was *not* fine was that everything that I had pinned to the Start Menu was no longer pinned to the Start Menu and had been replaced with fine Microsoft programs like Edge and Paint. I spent about 15 minutes unpinning *everything* that they put on the Start Menu and hooking back up all of the applications that I actually *use*.

Really, how bad does your upgrade code have to be to do something that stupid? Or did they think that they were actually going to make *friends* with someone by "helping" them in this way?

Ah, well. It's fixed now.

Trying to have a substantive discussion on Facebook is -- well, you've heard the aphorism about wrestling the pig? Pretty much the same thing, except you don't even get any exercise out of it.

In other news, we have had to give up on trying to go to FilkONtario this year, even though it is likely the last one. Our passports are all expired and just the cost of trying to get them back in order before we would need them to cross the border is an enormous expense. Couple that with the fact that school starts the weekend after the con and Worldcon is looming at the end of the month, and it just isn't something that is going to work for us.

Makes me sad though. I will miss seeing you all!

The day did not start out well for reasons that are not mine to share, although I suspect a number of you are aware of them.

Work was a train wreck. Fixes that I had made in one branch don't seem to be working in another branch. In a different area, our working code was ported up to Visual Studio 2019 where various event handling interactions with the software from another group at work are simply failing for no apparent reason. I finally got the attention of someone in the other group around 5 PM, I think, and then we worked on it until 8 PM on a Friday night, finding numerous things that we tried that do not actually fix anything. We can try again on Monday. I *was* informed that the other group couldn't be expected to change anything to make this work. I am not thrilled by this.

But the little cherry on top to make everything more fun was getting an email back from Universal Audio informing me that getting an RMA from them for my busted Apollo interface will not actually do any good, because they are closed due to COVID-19 and don't know when they will reopen. They have given me the web address of a shop in California that *may* be able to do the repair. I should have called them today to talk about it, but see above.

Let's try again next week, shall we?

A brief rant follows.

I was reading Facebook a few minutes ago (bad for my blood pressure; good for realizing that there are still other human beings out there) and saw a statement that began with "I heard".

Really? From who? Are they a particularly trustworthy source of information? Or are they notable for pushing their own agenda? Have you, perhaps, "heard" this from more than one independent source? (Blogs -- or even "reputable" news sources! -- that are busily quoting each other in a circle do not count as independent sources, although it's interesting to see how many of them are willing to put their reputation on the line.) Did you hear *part* of the story, because the rest of the story doesn't serve the purposes of the person who you heard it from?

We are *all* on edge. As I was saying in a conversation with a friend of mine a few days back, we are desperately short on actual data.

I would *love* to have more data.

I have very little use for "I heard".

Just some thoughts, with most of the serial numbers filed off.

I am a closet moderate. Really. (You can stop laughing now.)

I am also extremely cynical about politics. I do not believe I am excessively cynical, which sometimes makes me sad.

I have more respect for Daniel Biss than I do for either of the other two major Democratic candidates for governor, because he at least tried to do something about the pension problem in Illinois, even if the Illinois Supreme Court decided that approach wouldn't fly. I'd have even more respect for him if he had owned the attempt rather than running from it during the campaign.

While I'm mentioning pensions, I observe that they used to tell us that government workers deserved these pensions because they had worse working conditions and lower salaries than non-government workers. It is far from clear to me that this is still true, but the pension system is, apparently, forever.

I am always bemused by ads for candidates that tout credentials and political positions that have absolutely nothing at all to do with the office that they are running for. I could name one, but that particular crook -- happily! -- lost.

Pro-tip for Republican primary voters: when the other party is running primary season ads where they refer to a Republican candidate as "the true conservative" in the race, this is an indication that they think you are about as smart as Daffy Duck and that you can be persuaded to nominate said "true conservative" who will be toast in the general election. Sometimes, they are correct. If you have forgotten, just search up "Todd Akin" in your browser.

However, the good news for the Democrats is that by helping gin up a competitive Republican gubernatorial race, they managed to stop a lot of what I would classify as "good government Republicans" from pulling a Democratic ballot for the primary. Well done! It didn't achieve all of your goals, but it helped out a number of candidates backed by the party machine.

That's probably enough for now.

Since I am a DirecTV customer and still have an AT&T landline, they bombard me with offers for their 40 MBPS Internet service. I have been skeptical about this, although it would be a good deal were they actually able to deliver.

But when I finally go in and check my address -- which they know, because I am a current customer -- it turns out that I can get a stunning 3 MBPS Internet service.

Assuming, of course, that they are actually capable of delivering that.

I hate Comcast. I am now trying to decide if I hate AT&T more, because the new TV season is about to begin and if the DirecTV DVRs are going to be replaced, best if it were done before they start stockpiling episodes to watch.

Idiots.

The above almost scans to the last line of the chorus of "The Rainbow Connection", which is a lovely song and does not deserve to be associated with what I'm thinking right now.

So you may recall that last week, UPS managed to misplace my Next Day Air tax return information that was coming back to me from the accountant so that it arrived three days late on a trip here from Evanston, which is only about eleven miles from here. I was told that it was a small package and easily could have gotten lost. Where exactly it had gone to hide for three days was never revealed to me.

Because our toilets are old, first-generation, low-flow models, I ordered three new toilets from Amazon to replace them, prompted by the leak in the ceiling in our family room when I was plunging recently. Today, five boxes arrived and were placed in the garage by our very helpful and friendly UPS man. (Really! I appreciate it!)

Now those of you who are not math challenged might wonder how five boxes relates to three new toilets and that would be a fine question. What I had in hand were two-and-a-half toilets. The enormous box containing the bowl for one of the toilets was not there.

I went to my Amazon orders list. All three tracking numbers showed as "Delivered".

I called UPS. They explained that there should be six tracking numbers for six boxes. And when I checked, I discovered that there were indeed different tracking numbers on the bowls and the tanks.

So I got on the chat line with Amazon and got the missing tracking number, suggesting that it might be good if they provided two tracking numbers when two boxes were shipped. The rep agreed.

And checking the new tracking number with UPS, it showed as "Out for delivery". Ok. Why it would not be delivered with the other five boxes was a bit of a mystery, but let's see how this plays out.

I checked again a few minutes ago. The bowl of toilet number three is now listed as "Delay", with the additional notation that "A required security check has delayed delivery."

What does that mean? The TSA has decided to perform a pat-down search on my toilet bowl?

Enquiring minds would like to know...

We talked to the competent technician on Wednesday morning and he called Whirlpool up again and convinced them that they really should swap out the existing hot water heater. Armed with an RMA number, we set out for Lowe's.

Where they were pretty much completely clueless. Even after calling over a more experienced person to the service desk, they couldn't manage to figure out from the original receipt that they had installed the water heater -- although it included lines like "Installed Sale". Nor did they understand how the installation of the new heater was supposed to be paid for, despite having sold me the extended "service" plan that had managed to keep us without regular hot water for more than two weeks.

By the time we were done:

Despite having an RMA number, I would have to pay them for the new hot water heater. They would refund the money when the old one was returned.

They don't actually stock a water heater like the one that I had previously purchased. If I wanted that water heater as a replacement, I would have to wait two weeks for them to special order it.

But they did have a similar one with a lesser warranty. And it was not like I actually had a choice that did not involve two or more weeks with no hot water.

Oh, and I would have to pay for the installation and then send the receipt to the company that managed the service plan to get reimbursed for that.

The net result of all this was shelling out nearly $1000 (reimbursable, assuming that no one messes up) for my covered replacement.

Given the amount of stomach lining this has consumed, this has been a very expensive service plan.

However, they did manage to schedule the install for today. The new water heater has been installed and appears to be working fine. The hulk is supposed to have been returned to Lowe's, so I should get that credit.

And we have hot water.

Finally.