Taking a Whack Against Comcast. Mona Shaw Reached Her Breaking Point, Then for Her Hammer — Washington Post

“It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset”

I’ve got nothing to add to that. But I will use the excuse to tell this story:

Once our house modem broke. So I rented a car and drove out to the nearest comcast office near Ypsilanti. It’s a grey slot in a strip mall, decorated with a poster and a TV bolted to the ceiling playing a comcast television station. Maybe there was a poster. At the back there was series of comcast people in comcast polo shirts behind a desk and a wall of half-inch thick plexiglass. Their were no comcast employees on the customer side of the glass. Each representative had a big box made of the same plexiglass, through which you could see the stout mechanism which kept it from opening on both sides at the same time. Whatever you had that was broke went in there. To talk to the representative you had to bend well down and shout through the little perforations in the perspex. I’ve been in check-cashing services in West Sacramento that were more personable. I’ve felt more at home in late-night liqour stores in Pasadena. I’ve never visited an inmate at a correctional facility, but if I did and they wanted to know what problem I was having with my tv service it would probably feel familiar. The representative didn’t show much emotion during our exchange, but somehow I still felt dirty placing my broken cable modem in the box, and retrieving my replacement from it.

I’m not sure what to take from that experience. It’s still somehow unsettling when I remember it. Are things really that bad?