BALLS TO THE WALL.

YES! yes. i did it. i won. i fought comcast and i WON! i love it. okay here’s the story, in brief:

once upon a time, i lived in massachusetts with two friends. since i already had a comcast account, i kept it under my name after we moved in together. two years later, i moved out of said apartment. however, i was leaving a month before the end of the lease. one of my roommates was staying in the apartment, so a new person was taking over my part of the lease, essentially. instead of having to change accounts a million times, i kept mine open until this new girl moved in, then promptly cancelled and forgot all about it.

two months later (this is november, ‘07 now) i get a bill in brooklyn for $210 for an unreturned cable box. hm, i think to myself, that’s odd, because i could’ve sworn ross said it got picked up. so i call ross to confirm. yup, a comcast tech guy came to set up the new stuff for the new account, and took the old stuff with him. so i obviously call comcast to see what’s the dilly, because i don’t want to pay for something i shouldn’t have to. after a few phone calls, we finally get it settled. cool.

fast forward to two weeks ago (september ‘08). i get another bill. from comcast, a company i haven’t used in over a year. this one is for $210 for an unreturned cable box. but there is a credit for $80 attached to it, so now i owe them $130. um, hello? so i call them the next day, but it’s after normal business hours so i end up talking to some customer service guy instead of someone in the billing & research department like i should. anyway, he tells me that sometimes the techs forget to fully disengage (or whatever) pieces of equipment, so maybe someone new just got my old cable box, turned it on, and it was still registered to me so i got a bill for it. he tells me he’ll put a note in the file, and i should expect a check for the $80 credit in the mail. uh, negative.

i get a phone call on monday from a billing & research guy who – in sum – told me that the guy from last week was totally wrong, ross is proooobably just lying about the tech, and that i’m going to get charged because it’s my name on the account. he didn’t say it as fresh as that, but the condescending tone got the message across just fine. i asked him a series of well thought-out and important questions (like… if this wasn’t resolved last year, why didn’t a receive a whole series of other bills threatening to send goons to beat me up if i don’t pay?) which this guy could not give concise answers to.

so finally i’m like… it’s time for some action. so i go to consumerist.com (and you should, too, because it’ll change your life) and look up “comcast”. one of, if not THE, first article is a list of about 80 comcast exec’s email addresses, and a few tips on how to write an “eecb”, or “executive email carpet bomb” without being a total douche. how it works is you write to many MANY of the most important people at a company (for example, comcast), explaining (nicely!) that their employees are relatively incompetent and are not doing anything to help a crappy situation that they caused. basically it’s meant to be a last resort, but a very very effective one.

and so it was. i wrote out a polite, thought out message about four other people’s incompetence and why i felt like it was unfair that i should have to pay such an extreme amount of money for their mistakes. AND IT WORKED. i got three emails within about two hours, all with apologies for my inconvenience. granted, they were kind of generic, but it paid off! because one of them said he’d call, and he did. i got a phone call from one of the exec peeps (or one of their cronies) today telling me that they were wiping out the bill and i can expect my $80 credit in the mail shortly.

that’s right! suck it, comcast!