Wudda been nice if they had mentioned it...

[susandennis]

Remember how impressed I was with Comcast service?  Both the phone and the technician who came out?  Well, now I'm not quite so impressed.   My bill has a one time charge of $19.99 for 'Service Call'.  Neither person I dealt with mentioned this charge.  And $19.99 is a stupid amount.  It's an amount clearly set to annoy me and not to offset their expenses. 

On the up side, I had been impressed enough to consider maybe switching my internet over.  I'd been working through the details of that in my mind but this puts the kibosh on that.  I am not opposed to paying.  I am opposed to being slapped with an annoyance fee without even so much as a hint that I might. 

Comments

[kyrielle]

Oh, yuck. :( You might call and complain, because they did not mention it before anyone came out, you may be able to get them to reverse it. (Not that that removes the aggravation or the ick factor, but hey, it saves almost $20.)

[saveferris.livejournal.com]

When I moved last year I was slapped by Time Horror with a $79.95 charge because they had to send someone over here to manually spark my coax and test the signal strength. I had everything in the flat wired. I took all of 5 minutes and the TWO techs they sent laughed under their breath when they came inside to see I'd done their work.

Had they told me up front when I called to transfer my service, it would have been just a little bit different but, at the time, they told me nothing about this charge. It just showed up on my bill one day.

I called repeatedly and bitched. I seem to recall they knocked off all but about $20. I made it my purpose in life to get Time Horror out of my life. I now have satellite instead of cable and every few months, I investigate the latest rates for DSL so I can dump RoadRunner. Sadly, I'm not willing to pay 50% for lesser bandwidth. But I keep looking.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

There's a reason its something silly like $19.99. Believe it or not, far fewer people will get pissed about $19.99 as will about $20. Strange but true.

[susandennis]

I get the sub $20 factor. My point is that a service call should be something like $75 if they want to cover costs. Anything less is priced to simply annoy the customer. Which it certainly did.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have been annoyed with even a $19.99 service charge...if they had mentioned it up front. My beef would be that they didn't tell you about it before you got the bill.

Here, Comcast gives you a "work completed" type statement before the service person leaves, he signs it, you sign it, and it contains *all* charges that you are going to be assessed, in detail. I've just always kind of assumed that's how everyone did it.

squeak!

[henare.livejournal.com]

that seems pretty sleazy. i'd complain asap.

that said, i'm surprised at how trouble-free my comcast internet has been so far. i can't believe that i paid pac*bell so much for not nearly enough service. i buy their 16Mb service and routinely get downloads at up to 2x that rate. no outages to date either. very pleased.