Comcast Customer "Service"

I was at work, barely out of an all-afternoon meeting, when tamidon calls me from her cell phone:

"We have no cable, no internet, and no phone. Can you deal with Comcast?"

After hitting both of Comcast's websites (.net, which is a portal of dubious quality, and .com, which is ostensibly what I want but in fact useless), I call their toll-free support line. The phone maze asks me my service's telephone number, my address, whether I want to continue in English, and then to pick which of the three services I'm calling about, so I pick "Phone". This dumps me into a black hole, so I start over. After wending my way again thru the phone maze, I pick "Cable", figuring that Comcast cares more about television than about internet. I get a customer service dweeb almost immediately.

"Hello, my name is FeRnando. How may I be of seRvice?"

Pretty hard on the 'R's there, but it sounds like a midwest American accent, at least. "Hi, we're not getting any cable, internet, or phone."

"Can you turn off your cable box so that I can reset it?"

"Hang on, let me call my wife's cell phone."

So there I sit, phones against each ear, relaying instructions and (lack of) results. Fernando determines that he's run out of script, so he says that he'll have to call in a technician to come over to the house.

I get put on boring hold music. I tell tamidon what's going on. She hangs up. I wait some more. Then Fernando comes back to tell me that he will not be sending a service technician to my house, because the local office knows about the neighborhood-wide service outage and is already working on it.

I thank Fernando, because it's not his fault that fucking Comcast can't figure out that when I had to provide my address early in their phone tree that they could have told me right then and there that they knew about the regional problem!!!

I wish we had competition for two of the three services that they provide. But they're actually better at phone service than the previous two companies we dealt with from here.