Xfinite Absurdity: True Confessions of a Former Comcast Tech Support Agent
by kliq
A few years ago, I wrote an article about my time as a tier two tech support agent at AT&T that appeared in the Winter 2010-2011 issue of 2600. With the recent news of AT&T's attempt to acquire DirecTV, as well as Comcast's recent merger with Time Warner (which further reduced an already (((oligarchic))) industry), I became inspired to recall my time with Comcast. How does the biggest cable company in the world behave behind the scenes?
The first thing to understand if you ever require Comcast customer support is that your chances of reaching an actual Comcast employee are extraordinarily low. The company outsources the majority of their customer service work to another company named Convergys, the company that I worked for. (If you want to freak them out, ask if they've ever had their cell phone confiscated by a supervisor. There are managers who are paid to catch customer service agents texting while on calls.) Because AT&T consists of the remnants of Ma Bell, that benevolent empire, the union was pretty strong, and thus, most people who work for AT&T actually work for AT&T. Much like its Death Star-shaped logo, AT&T was once a great company, but a thirst for power and wealth sent it down a dark path. Comcast holds zero connection to this idyllic American, blue collar past.
Comcast governs like a Soviet bureaucracy, and the first thing a dictatorship does is rebrand itself. When I started working in online support for Internet and phone service, many of the questions I received from customers involved confusion about who they were doing business with: "I just received a bill from someone named Xfinity. I've never heard of Xfinity. Did you guys transfer my account to someone else?" When I asked a supervisor what I should tell them (since "This company just made up a bullshit name to seem cutting edge," was probably not an option), I never really got a straight answer. So, I tried to explain that Xfinity is the product and Comcast is the company, the way Sprite is a product of the Coca-Cola company. Few people ever understood why Comcast needed to change the name, but I repeated this statement again and again until customers accepted that two plus two equals five.
This atmosphere of confusion proved to be par for the course for an employee of Convergys. Supervisors knew less about technical support than I did, and Comcast changed its mind constantly, leaving the grunts to make up excuses and lies. "Why do price points change?" customers demanded. "Why can't I get the same Comcast package as my friend in another city?" and "Why didn't the guy show up today?" The searchable database they provided us was just another labyrinth of misinformation to become lost in, so the best part of the job became crafting creative propaganda. (One of my favorite things to tell customers was that I had to run tests on their equipment, when I was simply accessing their account.) Since I worked in online support, the worst thing customers could do in response was type in all caps.
Then, Comcast changed its mind about my position. Apparently, paying Americans to troubleshoot American technical issues cost the company too much money (Comcast's annual revenue is north of 60 billion dollars). So, my job was sent to Manila and I was transferred to phone support for digital cable, after which I was given a grand total of five days of training to learn to troubleshoot a completely different service. Once I began taking calls for cable, I quickly realized that when Americans cannot watch television, all of their repressed marital rage floods the telephone lines. I had never heard anything like it, despite having several years of customer support under my belt, and experiencing nationwide cellular blackouts. I started to wonder what would happen if all of this outrage could be focused at our corporate puppet government officials and concluded that we would probably live in a much better society. (Comcast's annual lobbying budget is north of 15 million dollars. Its biggest checks are sent to both the Democratic and Republican governors' associations.)
Chicago customers were by far the angriest and immediately escalated calls to a supervisor. I asked a supervisor why they were so angry, and she said that Chicago's infrastructure is old, so it breaks a lot. In other words, the largest media company on this planet could not afford to pay for native English speakers, nor could they afford to upgrade their own infrastructure, but they could afford to fill campaign coffers.
After a few weeks of being constantly cursed out, I decided to experiment. Convergys tracked when you were at your desk by requiring every employee to type in a series of numbers on their phone to log in. When I was transferred to cable support, I was given a new login number. So, one day I decided to log in with my old online support number. The system accepted it! For the next eight hours, I received absolutely zero calls despite my name showing up in the system as available to take calls. Since supervisors are constantly taking escalated calls, no one ever checked to see how I was doing. To avoid detection, I crafted a daily regiment of logging in with my online number for the first few hours, then taking actual calls for a few hours, and then finishing my day with more glorious silence. I maintained this routine until I secured another job.
When I was troubleshooting Internet and phone service, most of my day was spent fixing simple issues such as resetting passwords or walking customers through resetting their modems. One day, however, I got an irate customer who could not access BitTorrent. Since about 99 percent of Comcast's customers seemed barely able to operate a keyboard, I was taken aback by seeing an issue this advanced in my chat window. The truth, which of course was not in the support database, was that Comcast had contracted Sandvine, a Canadian network management solution, to limit torrenting. Sandvine's services sent TCP reset packets when customers tried to torrent too much, although now it has been discovered that this occurred when customers torrented from non-Comcast customers.
In short, Comcast, the largest mass media company on the planet, was behaving like a hacker. Regardless of your opinion of the morality and legality of file sharing, it is an individual's risk to take. As media companies continue to consolidate, however, they are more likely to view the Internet as their kingdom. Comcast is not just a data pipeline: they own NBC and therefore have a financial stake in ensuring copyright laws are rigidly followed. This, by the way, is what makes net neutrality such a crucial issue. When companies control both content and distribution, they no longer have to answer to anyone for their behavior.
So what did I tell the BitTorrent customer? "Comcast cannot be responsible for any specific website's functionality. You will have to contact the webmaster." The customer had no choice but to accept it. So the next time you speak with Comcast technical support, keep in mind that they are probably constructing lies to explain the actions of the world's wealthiest hacker. American cable companies control your access to the global economy, and hire people far away from you to absorb your complaints. Employees are outsourced to underscore that they are as replaceable as a faulty router. Due to a stranglehold on our politicians, cable companies will never have an incentive to compete for your dollars.