Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 356 posts

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#341

Post by bausson »

duiker101 wrote: post #208
bausson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the famous "Only doing its job" excuse. Yes, their job is shitty, but when your job is to bully people (by phone or otherwise), don't expect rainbows and unicorns.

I don't know how the situation for jobs in the US is but in Italy, where I had my experience, the people that do this job don't do it because it's their dream job but because they have bills to pay and finding "something better" is not always easy.

Job market isn't great here either (France, so not as bad as Italy), and I perfectly understand one taking a shitty job to support one's family.

Still, getting a job where you are paid with my money to harass me is not the way to get on my good side. Either way, I never take those calls, and never take anonymous calls either, unless I'm looking for a job.

Beside, that kind of behavior from a company here (in France at least, and probably most of Europe) is probably illegal.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#342

Post by Nursie »

cookiecaper wrote: post #324
MichaelApproved wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you put up with them charging you so many times. After the second fraudulent charge, I'd just deal with my credit card company directly. Call them up and have the charges reversed. You get your money back and they get punished by their card company for the fraudulent charge. If more people did this, instead of waiting on hold for hours to fight with customer service for your own money back, the…

afaik Europe doesn't have the same rules regarding chargebacks and it's much harder to successfully dispute a charge there. Chargebacks only work the way they do in the U.S. due to regulatory requirements that the card companies allowed to go into law because they'd figured out how to profit any time a chargeback was filed.

Chargebacks in the UK are protected by law, where credit is concerned, because the CC company is a party to the debt they are legally compelled to return the money to you pending an investigation.

I don't know about the rest of Europe but here in the UK it's just as easy as the US and just as black and white.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#343

Post by smcl »

renata wrote: post #215
vonmoltke wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a gym allowed to demand such documentation in the first place?

I'd be more concerned with having to register with a city....

This is common if you live abroad - registering with the foreign police.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#344

Post by teekert »

Nelkins wrote: post #195
teekert wrote: post #22

Here in the Netherlands the situation got significantly better after a famous comedian (Youp van 't Hek) went completely public with the misery that ensued after calling t-mobile to get a problem fixed with his sons iPhone. ( http://www.nrcnext.nl/blog/2010/10/25/youp-vant-hek-brengt-t... ) T-mobile found themselves suddenly completely on the defensive in various TV-shows. They apologized profusely. It was very funny…

Is there an English translation of this floating around somewhere? I'm curious to know the specifics of the exchange.

I can't find it if there is any. I'd Google "Youp van 't hek tmobile" and use Google translate, sorry.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#345

Post by netnichols »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #336
thatthatis wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cancel my service" "Can you cancel my service?" "I won't be answering any of your questions, just cancel my service". "Cancel my service or transfer me to someone who can" The use of worlds like "Please" and "I'd like to" just tells them that you'll indulge their scripts and tactics. It's not rude to steamroll a system intentionally designed to make it hard to cancel.

I learned that panhandlers, at least in Chicago, interpret polite negative responses as opportunity and will continue to bother me. So, I have taken to saying flatly, "Not happening." It's not so rude or demeaning that I inadvertently pick a fight, but it's blunt enough to let them know that they're just wasting their time with me.

When I'm in a place where these folks will follow you around, I turn as robotic as possible and answer once (or maybe twice to make things perfectly clear) with a simple "no". I try to leave no room for interpreting playfulness or agressiveness.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#346

Post by wildpeaks »

alttab wrote: post #248
Nickoladze wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Oh, you want to transfer your Comcast account to a new home? Tell me your new address and we can start the migration process."

Totally sleezy. No self respecting person would do this. That said, I've dealt with comcast before. After telling them I would cancel due to their arbitrary "end of promotion" I was redirected to their "loyalty department" which miraculously found another promotion for me that would prevent me from paying $80 a month for slow buffering internet.

> Totally sleezy. No self respecting person would do this

If it even occured to them it might be sleezy, they'd rationalize that they do it to please their boss and keep their job, and that it's more important to them than being decent to a random stranger :/

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#347

Post by thearn4 »

woogle wrote: post #71
zerohp wrote: post #57

There's only one easy way to cancel service with a company like Comcast. You have to lie and tell them you're moving to a city that they don't serve. They don't transfer you to customer retention and you'll be off the phone in a few minutes.

What is terrible is you have to LIE. I understand the OP POV. He has the right to disconnects without justify himself. This is a privacy matter. The operator acting is barely legal.

I agree, I hate the idea of normalizing this kind of behavior.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#348

Post by devicenull »

otakucode wrote: post #315
spodek wrote: post #174

We're an entrepreneurial community and here is a case of demand. Why not meet the demand to cut off internet services? One idea: create a phone service where I call a third-party (you, the entrepreneur) that connects me to the best number to cancel my service. The third party determines if recording the call is legal and records if so, posting the recording online, along with metadata: date, duration, agent name, loc…

Or, if you need to cancel your service, make a short phonecall informing them that you are cancelling your service effective immediately and if they attempt to charge your account again, the charge will be contested and complaints will be filed with the Better Business Bureau. Then hang up. You don't actually need their permission to cancel your service with them at all. You shouldn't be ASKING to cancel your service…

If only the BBB had any actual power!

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#349

Post by SilasX »

warfangle wrote: post #164
wallawe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point all together. The only reason a company can behave this way and retain the number of customers who would have otherwise moved elsewhere is because there isn't a free-market. The companies are run as oligopolies. It is government intervention and protection that has caused this problem in the first place which is what most people don't realize.

(edited for source) There is no such thing as a free market: it is an idealistic theoretical construct. And even if it were real, it would only be efficient if P=NP[0]. 0. http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284

The whole trick behind that paper is to take the definition of "market efficiency" to mean that all profit opportunities, even those requiring solving difficult computational problems, are identified immediately. Then, you encode NP-complete problems as exchange offerings, and the efficient trader would have to be an oracle for it.

This is, obviously, not what most people have in mind by market efficiency, and simply means that the definition needs to be generalized to account for lags in pure inferential operations -- i.e. "all profit opportunities are exploited as soon as a real-world computation system could notice it". Still a strong claim, but not trivially refuted by turning exchanges into oracles by clever choice of exchange offers.

Note: no one thinks all markets are efficient in the "EMH sense", only highly-liquid ones like electronic securities exchanges in developed countries. Also, it's different from the sense of Pareto-efficient that most political advocates of markets mean when advocating them.

Re: Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues

#350

Post by snowwrestler »

aganders3 wrote: post #278
renata wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, if you're in a one-party state, recording the call can never hurt.

Usually they are recording the call anyway (or reserving the right to). A robot normally mentions it at the beginning of the call. I'm no lawyer, but maybe this is enough to give you permission to record your own copy?

If both parties are aware that the call may be recorded, then either party may record it. That is covered by the boilerplate "this call may be recorded" language that pretty much every call center uses.
Post reply on HN