Image by stevegarfield via Flickr

I am not a BIG FAN of product support…..except, of course, when things go south. Perhaps it comes from the days when I operated in that capacity (and occasionally still do for at-home items, but I digress), or from the bad old days of sitting on hold for untold hours waiting for someone with the actual answer to give it to me, so I could fix the broken whatsit and get back to work/play/whatever.

Things have gotten better….

Recently, we analyzed our household finances (who hasn’t?) and decided to drop our DSL line, down-level our COMCAST package and bundle their broadband into that (with a resulting $45/month savings….every little bit helps).  This required a visit by a COMCAST technician to install the cable modem and he also kindly reconfigured our TV, DVR, and DVD boxes so I no longer had to unplug/replug cables whenever I wanted to switch from DVD to DVR.  He moved and reset our wireless network so my desktop PC, previously attached by wire, was now up and running on wireless (Surprise!  My desktop had a built-in wireless card I didn’t even know about!).

So far so good.  However, now, about 2 weeks later, by desktop showed only about 20% signal strength and I could not even get my browser’s home page to load.  My spouse’s PC was having problems, too.  Since the last thing changed was the move to COMCAST, I called their customer support (this was on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, so I wasn’t too happy about being inside trying to fix this, but anyway….).

I got the “your call is important to us” and the “we are experiencing high call volumes” messages and settled in for what I thought might be a LONG wait.  Within 3 minutes, I was talking to Greg at COMCAST support.  After about 3 minutes, I knew I was talking to the fellow with the actual answer, but we needed to figure out the question.  Greg and I worked through a number of procedures including resetting the cable modem and my wireless router, before we discovered that the problem was my internal wireless card.  I swapped my spouse’s wireless adapter onto my PC and now it worked great…..Greg had led the troubleshooting through to the solution and it was in no way COMCAST’s problem.  Nonetheless, he helped me to the solution, for which I am VERY GRATEFUL!  A quick trip to the local electronics super-store for a new wireless adapter and my broadband is faster than ever.

I’m impressed.  Thanks, Greg.  Thanks, COMCAST……Greg deserves a raise.