This is how they win

I’m currently having a problem with my Comcast internet. It’s randomly resetting my connection whenever it feels like it. I’ll try to go to a web page, and immediately get “Connection Reset” errors. I’ll reload the page, and it’ll work fine for awhile, then I’ll get errors again later.  Or I’ll go to YouTube, watch half a video, then the video will just stop.  And I can’t restart it. I have to reload the page and hope it doesn’t happen again! I’ve reset my modem and router multiple times, to no avail.

And you know what I’m going to do about this? Nothing. Nothing at all.  I’m going to sit here and just silently hope it goes away on its own in a few days. You know why? Because I just can’t deal with Comcast support. I’m not going to call them and go through half an hour of “troubleshooting” that I’ve already done, or nonsensical bullshit that never works like “unplug the modem and wait 30 seconds.”  Seriously, what problem is that supposed to solve? The problem where the tech needs 30 seconds to do a shot of tequila, maybe? In the history of solid state electronics, the “30 second power cycle” has never, ever solved a single problem. And yet techs still insist on trying it.

I’m not even picking on Comcast in particular here, although everybody knows their support is complete shit. The real problem is, they’re not alone in the tech industry. Everybody’s support is complete shit. And no, don’t tell me you got great support that one time at the Apple store. My experience with Apple was that their go-to “fix” for every problem with my iPhone was to give me a new phone. Which I’ll admit is better than Verizon, who prefer to simply refuse to fix any problems and deny that problems actually exist rather than give me a new device. But it’s still not exactly good support, it’s more like shooting your dog and getting a new one rather than taking him to the vet. It especially sucks when the problem was never with the handset in the first place, it was with AT&T’s shitty towers, so replacing the phone just made me go through heaps of reconfiguration for nothing.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point tech support stopped being about fixing problems and started being about getting you the hell off the phone as quickly as possible and making sure you never call back. And hey, that’d be great if the end result was that your problem was fixed quickly and completely. But that’s never the case. The end result is almost always the consumer being pissed off and drained, and, like me, fearful of ever calling again.

So, yeah. This is how they win. I’m not going to call and report this problem unless it becomes completely unbearable. Because even though it might be resolved quickly with a simple reset of my circuit, I’m loathe to go through the long, ridiculous script the no-nothing tech on the other end of the phone will be trying to follow before we get to that part. I’ll just live with it. It’s just the internet.

Maybe I’ll go to the gym.