Overheard in Pittsburgh

Friday I came home on my lunch break to find a Comcast van parked in front of my house. Although Comcast had at one point scheduled an appointment for Friday without my knowledge, I didn’t really believe that the van was there for me, so disillusioned am I with Comcast and its teasing, wanton ways. Also, I believed the appointment to have been canceled.

The technician, Ron Carter (the guy in the headline above), saw from the work order how much trouble we have had in getting our cable re-connected, so he waited for about an hour in the hopes that one of us might show up.

Mr. Carter said he didn’t want us to think that he had just not come, as others before him had done. This is the first time I have met a Comcast employee who has pride in his job. Countless customer service reps have told me about the inner workings of Comcast and how the processes there contain numerous dead-ends, needless waiting,
and independent contractors who simply don’t want to do their jobs. Despite whatever horror show it is that Mr. Carter might have to deal with at Comcast, there Mr. Carter was, smiling and friendly, understanding when I had to go back to work. I trusted him so much that I left him alone in my home.

When I came home Friday after work, I found the cable modem and tiny new digital cable box hooked up, the Welcome to Comcast literature laid out neatly on a nearby chair, and the cat I had put in the basement during Mr. Carter’s visit let out to roam freely in the hours between my lunch break and the end of my work day.
Does the amazing customer service of Ron Carter make me rethink my opinion on Comcast? No. I’ve never thought ill of any of Comcast’s employees; instead, I understand intimately how broken the Comcast machine is, and I empathize with these people whose efforts are so diminished by their employer.

I’ve written about this here because it has affected the site and because the sudden unreliability of my posting was embarrassing to me. I am glad people have been posting there own Comcast horror stories; please feel free to continue to do so. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one frustrated with Comcast and its practices. Plus they keep me from feeling so much like an Internet crank with an audience.

If you are disappointed that Overheard in Pittsburgh’s updates have suffered lately, please contact Comcast and tell them that Chris Griswold would like his Internet service to be installed finally. I also would appreciate it if technicians showed up when they are supposed to, customer service reps called back like they promise, they’d stop scheduling appointments without telling us, and the Comcast phone system wouldn’t dump customer calls when it wasn’t forwarding you to a call center in Texas.

I spend hours on the phone with Comcast just trying to get them to do what they promised: To send someone over and flip a switch so I could have cable. I left work early on Friday to be home when the technican showed up, but he never did, and this isn’t the first time. Comcast has a long history of horrible service. If you have a Comcast DVR, you know how bad the software is, and how often the boxes freeze up or dump memory. Guess what? Time-Warner DVRs don’t hurt to use, and neither do Tivos. In one year, I had to have the Comcast DVR replaced seven times because I could never depend on it to actually do what I was paying for it to do.

Comcast as a company should be ashamed for the state of its customer service department. Every time I speak to a customer service rep, I make it clear that although I am frustrated and angry with the situation, I know that they are not at fault. They tell me they understand awful the situation is, they agree that Comcast’s equipment is atrocious, and they speak under their breath to me about how ineffectual and uncaring Comcast is with regard to customer concerns.

I always wind up believing the reps when they tell me of their good intentions toward me, and nearly every time, I wait for them to call me back with news about the situation to no avail.

When a technician clumsily broke a set of picture frames, I was told I would be re-imbursed for them, but I was routed through several departments every time I called, and the one I needed was apparently always closed. Supervisors were supposed to call me back but never did.
Customer service isn’t supposed to make a customer feel helpless. But that’s exactly what Comcast customer service does.

I’m not the only angry Comcast customer:

• Comcast
  
• Comcast

Today’s entries are not brought to you by the Wii, which likes to freeze up on sites that use java — particularly those into which you have just entered large amounts of text — but by the kindly security guard I was able to convince I was a Pitt student shortly after midnight.

I am a super spy.

Because I have just moved, and Comcast has yet to install my Internet, today’s entries are all brought to you via my Wii. Friend code and disturbing Miis available upon request.

So that’s why I’ve been getting so many readers and submissions the past few days: Renaissance man Neil Gaiman, writer of The Sandman, among many other things, linked to the site, calling it one of the best of such sites on the Internet. I happen to be a huge fan of Mr. Gaiman’s, and so I use this as further verification of my coolness.

It’s also nice to know that this site was discussed in a recent ethics class at Pitt. Apparently, the class questioned the ethics of posting others’ private conversations to the Internet. I answered these questions for myself before I began this site, but I would love to hear more about this.

If you haven’t heard or read about it yet, you need to know this: The Port Authority has announced plans to cut more than half of their routes. And they want to raise the rates and lay off a ton of employees.

So, you know that bus with the long route that you have to wait for every morning to get to work or school? Soon, you very probably will have to walk farther and wait and ride longer so that you can work longer to pay the higher transit fees. And your driver will probably be in a pissy mood and not say clever things.

Progress Pittsburgh has more information on this here. The pamphlet describing the service changes is here. The pamphlet lists the times and locations for the public hearings, which begin on Monday, January 22 and continue through Wednesday, February 7.

The Port Authority has been disorganized and ineffectual for years. A rider shouldn’t have to check several unofficial Web sites just to try to make sense of the public transportation system. When I moved back to Pittsburgh from New York, I went through more culture shock than when I moved there, and largely due to the confusing and unreliable bus system.

I love public transportation; it’s nice to be able to sit and read on the way to work in the morning, to see all the different people who live in the city. It’s nice to be able to live in the city with the highest parking taxes in the country and not have to own a car.

The people and government of Allegheny County say regularly that they want to hold on to the young people of the city, that they want us to build our lives and homes here. But not all of us are in the “cupcake class”; many of us have to work the service jobs that support the more affluent’s living and spending habits. Many of us rely on the buses to get to work or school, to improve our lives to the point that we might be able to afford a fancy cupcake now and then.

If these changes go through, I think it’s time for us to take a look at how important living in Allegheny County is to us and at how much it costs us in time, money, effort, and stress. The changes may not even affect me directly, but I’m not sure I want to live in a city that treats its citizens this way. I am seriously considering moving to another, more livable city, should this organization continue to waste taxpayer’s money without taking care of the people it is supposedly committed to serving.

It’s time to get serious about our public transportation. Pittsburgh is a great place, and it’s easy to feel proud to live here; however, the transit situation as it is difficult, and we can’t let it get worse.

I encourage readers to attend these public hearings, as well as any rallies that might be planned. Go and speak. Tell the men in suits how this will affect your life. And tell them that you can take away the thing this city says it needs: you.

Chris Griswold,
Overheard In Pittsburgh

What were your favorite Overheard in Pittsburgh entries from the past year?

2006 was a pretty good year for Overheard in Pittsburgh: We posted nearly 500 entries, we graduated to a better site, several publications wrote about OIP, and Pittsburgh’s especially awesome bloggers extended their goodwill. I accepted an award awkwardly in a room full of people who were either cooler or much richer than me, and I stood out like a sore thumb at Blogfest 5, where people were very nice. Oh, and a Suicide Girl linked to Overheard in Pittsburgh in her blog, which makes me consider whether I am, in fact, a CoolDude™.
Readers e-mailed just to tell me they liked the site, and more than I might have expected wrote to share interesting things they saw or heard, even though they figured I couldn’t use it: stories from other cities, from when they were in college, just because they thought I’d appreciate it. A high school friend found me because of Overheard in Pittsburgh, and when she visited Pittsburgh for a recent football game, she paid special attention to the people around her so she could submit something. A few readers wrote to tell me that Overheard in Pittsburgh calmed their homesickness, and one Australian reader told me that she had spread her enjoyment of the site to her friends in Brisbane.
Oh, and regular contributors Tia and Sophie, who have both provided us with lots of great material, both graduated from Pitt in December. Congratulations to both.

It won’t be easy to beat 2006, but I’ve been hearing great things about 2007: Supposedly, every schoolchild will eat Lunchables™ when they want, everyone’s love will be returned, and a new theatrical Care Bears movie will premiere. Like the year before it, 2007 will have a summer, but this one is supposed to be even sexier — and not in that shallow E! Entertainment Television way.

When I created the new site, I set the comments to require a simple registration in the hope that commenters might be more of a fixture on the site, and I felt their signing their comments with whatever name they choose would be a step in that direction. Unfortunately, comments have been pretty thing since the new site’s inception, so I’m going to remove the requirement.

For the record, registation is only for this site; Wordpress is the software Overheard in Pittsburgh runs on. No one, not even me, sees your password. Although anyone can now post comments freely, I encourage frequent commenters to register so they can enjoy mild celebrity, plug their Web site, and engage in witty repartee with one another.

So, leave a comment: How else could Overhead in Pittsburgh improve? What would you like to stay the same?

Rather than, or perhaps in addition to, MySpace, you might want to check out the new social network that was created in Pittsburgh: Humble Voice. The site is set up for artists and creative types to showcase their work within a social network. Just like MySpace created its site with the the lessons learned from Friendster, Humble Voice looks like it’s taking that next leap forward. For instance, Humble Voice counters all that annoying “Check out my band” nonsense on MySpace with more appropriate band integration from the very beginning.

So check out Humble Voice, and if you register, be sure to let them know I sent you. My username’s easy: chrisgriswold.

This is the sort of thing that Pittsburgh does well but that people are surprised to find out came from here. Check it out.

In case you haven’t seen today’s City Paper, it’s the “Best Of” issue, and Overheard in Pittsburgh is named winner of the reader’s poll as the best Pittsburgh blog. I notice we beat IheartPGH, another Pittsburgh blog you should really check out, and some obscure site called MySpace. There’s a great article in the paper by Justin Hopper, with a picture and everything. And the theme of the entire Best Of insert is eavesdropping, from cover to pull quotes, which I would like believe has something to do with Overheard in Pittsburgh.

So, yeah, I’m feeling pretty great today.

Thanks to everyone who voted; I really appreciate the support. When I found out a while back that Overheard in Pittsburgh had won, I had stopped paying attention to the visitor count and had assumed nobody was actually reading anymore. Well, it turns out I was wrong, and Overheard in Pittsburgh continues to grow in popularity.

I am now being inundated with great entries from people sharing the oddities and horrors that poke into their everyday Pittsburgh lives. Here, we can put them all together CSI-style to get an idea of what our shared Pittsburgh looks like.

If you’re here because of the “Best Of” article, I hope Overheard in Pittsburgh becomes one of your favorites as well. Oh, and please do send in anything you might have heard, whether it’s a crazy bus person, a loud cell phone call, or an annoying co-worker. In particular, I’d like to see more from Downtown and the suburbs (Let us know you’re out there). Submissions can be and often are anonymous, so you can contribute with
confidence.

I noticed a bit of a lag in loading the site today; this is not a normal occurence. The servers have just never had so very many people loading Overheard in Pittsburgh in such a short span of time. They will adjust, and the site should load normally from now on.

There’s a Best Of party tonight at Best New Club PRIVE Ultralounge in the Strip with music by Best DJ 7UP. I get to put on ym fancypants and mingle with the other winners early, but the doors open to the public at 9 p.m., and I would love to meet any Overheard in Pittsburgh readers.

Thanks again, and here’s to all the contributors and readers, without whom Overheard in Pittsburgh would not be what it is today. Oh, and especially my friend and future brother-in-law Steve Covell, without whom we would not have this new site. Thanks, Steve.

Chris Griswold
Overheard in Pittsburgh