Monday morning, at 8am, I call as requested to verify that I’m home and see if the technician can make it before 8:30am so I can catch my ferry to work. Unfortunately, it seems that the person I spoke to on Friday did not actually do what he said he’d done. There was no note in the account explaining the situation. So, once again I’m unable to get to work because I have to wait for Comcast to sort out their problems.

Just after 9am, the technician rolls up, looks at the problem and then discovers that he doesn’t have an HDMI DVR. I wouldn’t be too surprised at this normally, but for the fact that I had also talked to the person I booked the appointment with on Friday about that very topic to make sure that the person they sent out had an HDMI DVR with him. That too was meant to be in the notes. But it wasn’t.

The guy who turned up here this morning, when I mentioned that I’d specifically talked about HDMI to the person on the phone and that he’d promised it would be in the notes, simply replied that it was not unusual for them to miss information like that in the notes. He is now driving across Alameda to try to find another technician who has the right DVR on his truck for me.

So, by not making that simple note (despite saying he had), that tech support person on the end of the phone has managed to do three things:

1. Waste my time, making me even less happy with Comcast;
2. Waste the technicians time (he’s now got to drive around Alameda trying to find a compatible DVR);
3. Made him late for all his other appointments this morning, upsetting even more Comcast customers.

The one comment I do want to add though is that the technician who came out here this morning did care enough to both call all the other Comcast people he knew were in the area, and his boss to find out if there were any others in the area, and then drove off to find one who had a compatible box. He could easily have just said I’d need to book another appointment. From his comments, it sounds as though they’re used to being given incomplete information, and having to work around it. That’s a sad indictment of the efficiency of the company though.

Update: As promised, the technician returned having tracked down a new HDMI DVR, and that is now installed and working. The real test will be what happens when a scheduled recording kicks off (which I need to set up again), but he was more confident of this box being more reliable than the new one I had before.