Multichannel News' Steve Donohue has this fun report today about Bob Garfield, a media columnist for Ad Age, launching a blog called "Comcast Must Die." An outgrowth of a column of the same name that Garfield recently wrote, the blog is intended to serve as a place for Comcast customers to vent their spleens.
Garfield amusingly writes:
Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity, What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change their ways. This site offers an opportunity -- for you to vent your grievances (civilly, please) and for Comcast to pay close attention.
Garfield's original column was written from "Hell on Earth, Md.," namely Montgomery County, MD. He experienced the usual nightmare that cable installations foster.
The blog should (but probably won't) shake up Comcast and every other cable company to the raging enmity that bad customer service engenders (the industry has long known how upsetting to consumers its customer service practices are). Here are the emotions that Garfield, a rational, calm person otherwise, felt following his bad experience:
They have ruined two weekends and screwed up half of my telecom services. I will shake them down for as much free service as I can get, then drop them at the first opportunity. And they deserve it. They deserve much worse.
Well, the "much worse" part is clearly the Comcast Must Die blog.
It's no surprise to me that Garfield's bad experience occurred in Montgomery County, which is where I live. For some reason, the antipathy toward Comcast is particularly strong in this community, with folks (including journalists) I know here sending me emails, asking me to blog about how "greedy" or "evil" Comcast is.
My own experience with Comcast hasn't been noticeably good or noticeably bad, although I did note a while back that the company said it wouldn't stop billing me for cable modem service until I took 90 minutes out of my day to personally hand-deliver a crappy, old and totally useless Motorola Surfboard modem to its customer service center.
Comcast, to its great credit, isn't dissing the blog nor besmirching Garfield. Spokeswoman Genni Moyer is quoted in Donohue's piece as saying "With respect to the Web site, we recognize that it shouldn't take a public event for people to get customer service."
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:06 PM|Comments(0)
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