Amy Lu's View

Xfinity disconnected our internet on Friday. Intentionally. We were without internet access for 24 plus hours.

They did this without giving us any advance notice. 

They did this without contacting us after they had disconnected us. They did this without proactively taking steps to fix the problem. 

This is astonishingly bad customer service. It actually transcends the realm of customer “service”–it’s probably more helpful to classify it as astonishingly successful customer sabotage. 

They disconnected us without warning, but not without cause. No, it wasn’t because we didn’t pay our bill. There was a technical reason they needed to disconnect us. Of course, I don’t really understand it, but there was something wrong with “our line” that was making internet service crappy for everybody in the neighborhood. Maybe the tiny internet gnomes or trolls that live in the cable were having a huge and ongoing party and were too drunk to effectively use their magic to transmit data through the interwebs. 

Whatever. The cable needed to be cut/disconnected to improve service for several customers. Fine (although I do hope the tiny drunk gnomes found a new place for the party). But Xfinity couldn’t be bothered to tell us? Chad even talked to the guy who disconnected us (obviously, we didn’t know that was what was happening at the time)–Chad was out in the garage while the guy had the Xfinity service truck in the alley. No “Hey man, we’re disconnecting you” heads up transpired.

As we all know, you can’t just “call” a company like Xfinity when you have an issue. Chad lost years of his life to an automated menu purgatory he will never get back trying to report the outage (yes, 15 minutes on hold with Xfinity = 2 years of a middle-aged man’s life). THE OUTAGE THEY CAUSED!

AND it didn’t occur to Xfinity that they would need to do something to restore our service? No, in fact they mocked and gaslighted us–as soon as the Xfinity van pulled away, Chad saw a notice that there was a service disruption…that had been restored. Well, not for us!

I really am so bewildered by the situation that I haven’t even been able to get really angry yet. Was this caused by ineptitude, poor communication, apathy? A “We can do whatever we want because what the hell are you, the little customer, going to do about it?” customer service philosophy? Or does Xfinity really hate its customers, or perhaps just Chad and I specifically (okay, I know we’re probably not important enough to be targeted by Xfinity but sometimes a gal needs to feel special). 

We DID receive excellent customer service from the service man who came out on Saturday morning. He was not only on time and polite and friendly, but he restored our service and explained the situation. (We did not press him for answers because we were pretty sure it wasn’t his fault, and the absurdity of the situation really didn’t hit us until after he left. We were just so excited to get our interwebs back).

He did make sure to let us know that the customer service survey we would receive would only be about his performance–not our experience with Xfinity as a whole. 

Today at church we discussed how good things can eventually come from bad or challenging situations. I do realize that losing the interwebs is hardly a catastrophe, but from our privileged perspective, it was pretty frustrating. Yes, we still could access the internet via our phones and even use our phones as hotspots, but that could only get us so far. I could still get to Facebook and Wordle, but working from home was going to get tricky. (Thankfully, I have a selfie stick/tripod so I could use my phones for a Teams meeting without the video being too unflattering. I couldn’t blur my background, though, so I’m not sure how much of the clutter of my home office was visible). 

And how were we going to stream our entertainment? This was ruining a Friday night of television viewing! I mean, what were we going to do, talk to each other? (Yes, I’m stealing Chad’s line but I’m pretty sure jokes are marital property, and being married to a lawyer means I have a vicarious law degree). 

So, what good or at least beneficial things came from our period of internet estrangement?

Obviously, we now have a much greater appreciation for our good fortune that gives us reliable home internet access (which I’m sure we’ll soon go back to taking for granted). 

I was hoping for inspiration for an insightful blog post about our interdependent web–but although a great metaphor, the situation was almost too obvious. Plus, it’s hard to take inspiration from corporate dumbassery. 

But, since we weren’t able to stream anything, and we didn’t want to overdo that whole talking thing, we discovered we had an unwrapped old MST3K DVD! So we watched a truly horrible movie (“Red Zone Cuba”) that received a truly hilarious treatment from Mike and the Bots. 

Xfinity saved us from missing out on an MST3K episode that had fallen into our household obscurity…I guess that IS really awesome customer service!