A Guy’s House Burned Down, And Comcast Still Wouldn’t Cancel His Service

You have to hand it to Comcast: The cable giant’s notoriously bad customer service is nothing if not consistent, even if that means that it took multiple phone calls for a woman to get her father’s service canceled after his house burned down, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press is reporting.

On April 1, 66-year-old Jimmy Ware’s house in Saint Paul, Minnesota, burned down. The retired trucker, who regretfully didn’t have homeowner’s insurance, lost everything, including his TVs.

While Mr. Ware focused on finding a place to live, getting food and clothes, and other important things, his daughter, Jessica Schmidt, stepped in to help him tie up other loose ends. Figuring that her dad wouldn’t need cable TV for the foreseeable future, she called Comcast – and so began a week-long odyssey of increasingly frustrating phone calls.

Schmidt’s problems with Comcast stemmed from the fact that the company wanted her father’s account number in order to be able to talk to her, the Daily Dot reports. That was a bit of a problem, since as you may recall from the first sentence of this post, Mr. Ware’s house burned down. There were no records — contracts, bills, miscellaneous paperwork — with Mr. Ware’s Comcast account number that survived the fire, so Mrs. Schmidt couldn’t provide it.

“Gone in the fire.”

Schmidt offered to provide the last four digits of her father’s Social Security number, but rules are rules, and no one at Comcast would give her the time of day without the account number. An account number which, it bears repeating, was burned down in a fire — something that apparently no one at Comcast was able to wrap their head around.

Schmidt spoke to Comcast at least four or five times, at one point even giving them a perfectly reasonable choice.

“I’ve said to Comcast, ‘Here’s your choice, disconnect the service or send someone out to fix the cable, because it’s not working.’ The (Comcast) guy said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, because the house burned down.’ I said, ‘Exactly, shut the service off.'”

Eventually, someone higher up the chain in Comcast’s customer service structure realized that declining to shut off service after a customer’s house burned down doesn’t really make sense and offered to solve Mrs. Schmidt’s problem. Comcast spokeswoman Mary Beth Schubert issued a statement on Tuesday.

“We understand that this is a difficult time for Mr. Ware and apologize for the inconvenience. Comcast has safeguards in place to protect the privacy of our customers, including not allowing unauthorized users to make changes to a customer’s account.”

Another St. Paul family whose house burned down in a fire the same day as Mr. Ware said they had no problem getting Comcast to cancel their service.

[Image courtesy of: Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski]