Burton Speaks

I'm getting pretty irritated with Comcast. I "subscribe" to their high-speed internet services and, for the past three nights, my service has cut out quite unexpectedly so they can perform "service enhancements". I don't know what the hell they're doing, but my service would be dramatically enhanced if it worked - they tend to turn it off while I'm in the middle of doing things and I sometimes have to go into school to keep working.

I finally called and complained last night; I was really inconvenienced when it suddenly dropped right at midnight. I finally got to speak to someone who spoke enough English to understand my question, which was, "When will you be done 'upgrading' my service?' He, of course, couldn't answer but said, "Well, sometime after 9 AM tomorrow you should check on the 'Network Health' page on Comcast's site for future outages in the next two weeks.' Tragically, he couldn't look for me and I needed to wait for the nine-hour outage window to expire before theoretically being able to check. Well, I checked today and, after waiting 45 seconds for the page to load (glad my service was upgraded!) I find no notice of any upcoming outages - just a mostly-empty page (when it would even load.) Let it be known that if it goes out again, I'm going to be even more pissed off.

As a side note, this worries me were I ever to consider 'upgrading' to Comcast's highly profitable package of internet, TV, and phone service, because a complete nine-hour outage of all my services would be even more massively inconvenient... and heaven help the person who has an emergency during those hours and can't call 911. (That's one of the elegant qualities of the old POTS system, that's for sure.)