There’s a been a rash of new Comcast ads in the past few days, featuring a bunch of people in three-quarter view singing a really strange and monotonic rhyme about Comcast and all the ninjas and explosions it offers. But that’s funny, because when I think “Comcast”, I don’t think “funky and hip” so much as “they care more about customer satisfaction at The Wiener’s Circle.”
Check this review I wrote for Yelp D.C. for a good example:
I haven’t had the same bad experience with customer service; the people on the phones are mostly friendly. I do, however, rate this place only one star for its ridiculous service plans.
Here’s the best: if you call to cancel your service say, three weeks from the date you call, they turn your Internet service off IMMEDIATELY. I had to schedule a pickup the day before moving, which was, yes, three weeks from the date I called. Next thing I know, my Internet stops working. I call them up and they tell me it’s company policy that as soon as you request a service stop, they turn your modem off no matter how far out the actual end date may be. So I had to cancel that end of service, call again today (the day before we move out of town) and find out they don’t have a tech to come out today, so now we have to drive to the ass-end of NE and drop off the stuff ourselves.
Buy from RCN, whatever you do!
There you have it. Comcast: Truth in advertising is a bad idea.
I do miss the cheese fries and cherry milkshakes. And G and I sat at that same table the last time we ate at Ben’s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7822643.stm?lss
It seems this is a month old, but it’s all good.
Today I got a letter asking me to subscribe to the Washington Times newspaper, the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon-backed conservative oracle. I don’t know how I got on their mailing list, as I’m the type (both actual and demographic) who’s unlikely to respond positively to a printed quote from Rush Limbaugh that “The Washington Times is a paper I can’t do without.” But the whole thing provided some unexpected fun.
First the letter noted how the liberal media doesn’t care to report the real news that affects people like me, and that the New York Times now has a section of the paper devoted entirely to corrections. (Don’t all newspapers have this? “Section” in this case just means, “A few paragraphs on the back of page one like newspapers have done for decades.”) But the stones were hurled powerfully out of the glass house when the same letter disparaged — not once, not twice, but thrice — the terrorist-loving platitudes of one “Barrack [sic] Obama”.
Sadly for the consumer marketing team at Washington Times, they can confuse the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with military housing all they want and it won’t make much of a difference in my subscription status. After all, the liberal media thing has been working out pretty well for me.
What I’ll Miss Least: The transient nature of the city–at least the whitey part of the city. (NW, plus Capitol Hill SE and NE where we live.) I can’t shake the feeling that most people are here just to soon go somewhere else, and thus it’s harder to feel settled here than it has been in other mobile, creative neighborhoods of cities where I’ve lived. With NYC abuzz 24-7, settled was a relative term, but at least it makes everyone feel like one of the bees in the hive.
First runner up: The summer heat and humidity. Like swimming without a pool!
Also placed: Our old-ass apartment with its lack of air circulation and power outlets; confusing and poorly labeled road system; not enough going-out neighborhoods and the tiny size of the ones that exist; Metro delays, large areas of the city unserved by Metro trains and the lack of conductors who don’t pronounce “Judiciary Square” as “Ju-dish-u-ary”.
What I’ll Miss Most: Being in the political heart of the U.S. and everything that comes with it. In no other town in the U.S. can you to walk up to a random person in a bar and find out they work as a State Department liaison to Pakistan, or as an assistant for Ted Kennedy, or as a journalist working on an in-depth book about the failure of the Bush presidency. (And there’s never a shortage of the latter.) With the government comes the media swarm in which I work and the lobbyists, consultants and hangers-on that are part of how the country runs. Most people would probably find this group to be disgusting, and it often is. But if you want to be a part of the national conversation at the top level, this is where to bring the microphone.
First runner up: The great places to do some roadwork. My default running spot was the National Mall and surrounding area, and that was just as cool as it sounds.
Also placed: The cherry milkshake from Ben’s Chili Bowl; hot female Hill staffers walking around my hood; Eastern Market; the beautiful neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park; the fact that while it was still old-ass (see above), you could walk out the door of our building and see the Capitol dome and the Supreme Court; being only four hours from Pittsburgh; the fish-taco combo at California Tortilla; cherry blossoms and the other spring blooms; free museums.
Wish us luck on the move tomorrow; nothing cheers the soul quite like loading, driving 900 miles and unloading a UHaul 17-foot truck full of all your earthly goods.
Chicago buds, see you soon.
I thought I would share this Yelp.com review that I wrote for the WMATA. I was particularly inspired after calling four times today to fix a Smartcard problem and never being able to reach a human being:
“You know, when I first moved here, I looked at the concrete archway stations and green/red lights that make up the Metro platforms and thought, “Wow, this transit system looks mad cool, like an early ’80s dystopian sci-fi flick in the vein of ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Aliens’.”
But two years of Metrorail has brought the analogy full-circle: today I see the Washington Metro Transit Authority as a restrictive facehugger, wrapping its spiny appendages around the area’s commuter throat to spawn a series of acid-blooded delays, chest-burstingly high fares, and unresponsive customer service that makes you want to jump into a furnace only to be implausibly cloned 200 years later.
One extra star though for air-conditioned platforms. Those are nice.”
… while running on Capitol Hill. He looks a lot like Dennis Kucinich.
