Paul's Comments

Well, here we are with yet another problem with Comcast. Seems that because they have a cap on how much newsgroup usage you are allowed - it's 2GB which is a lot, and I don't have a problem with that other than I wonder if Comcast might have done better to just pay for a feed and run its own news servers - you have to have a comcast username and password in order to access Usenet news. Which they never asked me for one nor assigned me one, nor do they give any way to acquire one.

I also discovered the issue when I wanted to send e-mail using the domain name paul-robinson.us, via Netscape (which I did when I was using Cavalier as my ISP) as opposed to having to change my mail settings so I could use the webmail from the company that hosts this blog; then I'd have to send my incoming mail to them and with the levels of spam I get (most of which gets caught by the spam filters, but quite a bit still gets through) their miserly 10mb of space would fill up fast. I have my mail routed to a Yahoo! mail account which provides unlimited storage (formerly 1GB which was probably more than I'd need for life) and fairly good spam filtering.

So I try using Comcast's on-line chat and after waiting a few minutes I get a response from a clerk "Norie Lynn 21798". Seems Comcast has done an upgrade to their servers and the woman on the other end can't help me because she can't get access to the account system either to find out if I do have an e-mail address or to assign me one if I don't.

[N.B. I found out later that when you exit the chat the applet does allow you to print or e-mail the transcript, so I was wrong on this point, you can capture the text. I leave my original comment because I explain why it's important to be able to capture on-line text.]
But what's interesting is - whether this is intentional or not, I'm not sure - the Java applet used to provide chat doesn't allow you to capture the text of the chat (at least at my end; the system gives a reference number 10005747, which I have to capture manually by typing it in; I can't even cut and paste it because that feature is unavailable). I'm not sure if it's because they didn't think about it or because they don't want the customers to be able to record what was typed. In view of what I've heard I wouldn't put it past Comcast to tell its people to say one thing but deny it later. (Yeah, I know I could use print screen and capture each page; I want to rant a little here.) [N.B. Before I found out I could capture the transcript I ended up doing exactly that.]

When I used AOL Instant Messenger a lot to do chats - and I just realized it was nine years ago, about 1998 - I saved everything. Okay, I'll admit it; it was because I was talking to women I had met on line and I wanted to make sure when/in case I met one in person, if it ever turned out she was underage I could show that I had in fact asked her if she was at least 18 and she had actually said so. Some executive from Disney apparently was trolling for jail bait and got caught when he met a cop (who had been pretending to be under 18) and several other police officers who busted him for trying to pick her up to go to a motel room. Apparently some of the chat logs their side kept were pretty explicit in indicating he believed she was under age and I guess the guy had no choice but to plead guilty. It goes along with a conclusion I came to at some point, not sure if it was then or later, but it's this: if you get caught over something and you're doing something wrong, the paperwork you have around will hang you; if you're not doing anything wrong, your paperwork is what will save you. Keeping good records gives you evidence in the event your actions are questioned for misconduct.

So, anyway, I can't get service I'm paying for and Comcast can't tell me when the problem can be fixed because, again, I get a technician who is assigned to me to do something related to providing service from them and because of problems at Comcast the technician doesn't have the capacity to provide me with the service I have ordered. (At least I appreciate they're honest about it instead of giving me a bullshit story about how long it's expected to take. The fact that I cursed here tells you how upset I am.)

I think I agree with my housemate that I probably should ask Comcast to make an adjustment in my service. I think, in view of the messups, (this time I decided not to use the four-letter word again, as I didn't in my last article) I'll ask them to waive the installation charge. In the mean time I'll just have to use Google Groups to read news.