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Sorry I still hate Comcast

Wednesday, September 02, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Hate is a word I've tried to wipe from my vocabulary, along with need. You don't really need more than air, food, water, a warm place to sleep, basic medical care. There are lots of things that are nice to have, like hugs and kisses and great sound systems and business-class-or-better. But needs are pretty basic things. 

Hate? People throw that word around far too casually. The other day a rep of SXSW said that I had hated on them because I suggested they were taking money to keep me off the speakers list since 1998 or so. I had asked many times why I couldn't get in, and was met with a stone wall. So like all human beings, my mind filled in the blanks. I asked to be enlightened, if it wasn't a payoff, what was it? I offered to run a retraction if they would tell me the real reason. Stone wall again. Oh well. I don't hate them. The word I would use to describe my feeling about SXSW is frustrated. 

But Comcast? I think that's the real thing. I'll tell you why. 

Love and hate have a mathematical relationship: 

hate = love + betrayed 

I would love to have Comcast service, but I would never sign up for it again unless they apologized for the treating me so badly. And while most companies apologize when they screw up, I have a feeling that Comcast thinks I should apologize to them. And that ain't never going to happen. 

Why write about this today? Well they're getting a lot of kudos because they try to fix their fuckups with reps who use Twitter to find unhappy customers. When I got fired as a Comcast customer, I was in contact with their Twitter caretakers. Not only couldn't they stop the Comcast machine from chewing me up and spitting me out, they had the gall to say they liked me while they were doing it! Now that's really asking for the hate.  

Imagine a girlfriend dumping you, hard, and while she's doing it saying she likes you. Well fuck that shit bitch. <-- There's the hate.  

But their service is much faster than my AT&T DSL. I pay my bills, in full and on time (as I did with Comcast), and they don't have Twitter accounts. They never cut me off (knock wood), and I never have to talk to a Twitter rep who likes me. Maybe I'm weird but that's kind of how I like to do business.