Live By The Internet, Die By The Internet

I need to go back and re-read the book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” because in the heat of the moment any amount of small stuff can take over my thinking, my language and my behavior. Even if overreaction to a minor event causes temporary insanity (hopefully only temporary) pausing to do a post mortem can be useful to ferret out lessons learned. The Comcast internet outage yesterday in my area was probably such a “small stuff” episode in the grand scheme of things, but it will probably take some time to convince me that I overreacted to the circumstances. I guess it was the nine phone calls and my modem finally kicking back in at 2:00 AM that fried my brain. I’ll be traveling for a few days and will have the chance try to cool off before I think again about exercising my threat to call AT&T about replacing all of my dependence on Comcast for almost everything in my virtual life. I’ve vowed never to allow DSL into my life, but we’ll see. They also misspell U-Verse…a catchy phrase but also a little scary that I could get sucked into their universe the same way that Comcast has been having their way with me.

But enough about the problems and possible long range solutions: A quick retrospective to find the lessons learned is probably in order:

1. To a large monopoly, customer service is a marketing term and not an actual “service guarantee” to anyone. I pay for a service and when it breaks, it will be fixed on their terms and not mine. After all, it is a business and they are not about to apply an inordinate amount of resources to fix my problem when thousands of others are affected. I do doubt that it was hundreds of thousands as one tech informed me, but it does show that actions failing to back up the words in the advertising slogans attempting to personalize such a message is at best an exaggeration and in most cases simply not true. My father’s teachings to be as good as my word were for me and do not apply to the world at large.
2. It is all about people and not technology. When technology fails, people must face the problems and solve them. To do so, those people facing the public must be given instant communications about the situation, training on how to handle the problem and tools to follow-up. I honestly don’t know how I would re-vamp Comcast’s tech support line because to do it right would obviously cost more than they are willing to pay. I do know that reading answers from a script rather than listening is not the answer. I was told by one person that they had closed my ticket because the outage was reported to be over. When I complained that it was not over and I was still not online, the cat was let out of the bag that I was basically lumped into a category of calls and that after a certain point they don’t follow up any further. Shame on you, Comcast.
3. I learned that I have a very low threshold of tolerance for incompetence and misinformation. Based on a 5:30 pm call to a tech who was apparently unaware of the wider outage, we discussed my purchasing another modem from Best Buy (any Motorola Surfboard will work) and then calling back to activate the new modem. Sounds simple. Except that on the call back with the MAC ID on the new device I was told that they couldn’t activate that particular modem and anyway with an outage they couldn’t test it (after four hours we now all know there is really an outage). I really have to consider the source of information before I believe it. That goes for doctors, lawyers, teachers, online support tech and anyone else who probably doesn’t know my problem better than I do.
4. I really need to back off of my geekiness on occasion and find some life-balance. I guess I am writing about this because I also believe that this is a demon we all face. Psychological addiction to anything can overshadow what is really important. This is a lesson in prioritizing things that are important and if I were to take my own advice I would figure that out before letting the small stuff take over and crowd out the important stuff.

Well, I cancelled some of my Tuesday morning and am leaving for #TruBoston much later than I had hoped. I am looking forward to how it will benefit me to learn from the best people in the world, but more importantly it is also about getting to know some of the best people in the world better. It is all about people. And when I return home I also have to keep my promise to focus on the important stuff by spending time with my wife who is walking around today bleary eyed after my 2:00 am rants on the phone and my swearing loudly at my computers. I think some roses and a romantic dinner are in the near future.