4 ms·

When I was 18 I worked in a call center for AT&T@Home broadband cable. This was 2000, when the business was in its infancy and there were often technical issues

When I was 18 I worked in a call center for AT&T@Home broadband cable. This was 2000, when the business was in its infancy and there were often technical issues. I worked the "supervisor" desk (i was not a supervisor, just a somewhat more knowledgable rep) so would take almost exclusively irate calls. I tried to help everybody of course, but a few people stood out from time to time as having exceptionally bad service. Bury requests that were cancelled for months -- so you have to mow your lawn around a cable and it trips your kids and gets chewed by rodents. Techs that hang a "we missed you" card on your door and then run back to the truck without ever knocking. Installers napping. Installers looking at porn. Installers going through peoples things. For those people, I gave them free service "for life". Deep inside the GUI app that I believe was called ACSR was the service provisioning and in every market there were all the paid services and a fairly similar list of free services that were used when the equipment was just being installed and users were brought online to test it. So they had "1.0 MB Broadband" and "1.0 MB Broadband Pilot". By moving users from one to the other, their bills would just drop to $0. I have no idea how long this benefit endured. You'd think at some point there would be an audit or migration that cleaned it up. But I hope not. Steve Roach in Memphis and the 1/2 dozen others: I hope your cable is still free.

fixermark 12y ago
My university was apparently grandfathered into that category (for their off-property students) when the local ISP company was bought by Comcast; the original provider had put the uni into their "Other" billing category as it was a special off-rate annually-negotiated contract, and when they unified the IT systems they got moved into that "billed 0" category in Comcast's backend. Yep, sure enough, an automatic cleaning script came along and killed all those cost-0 connections, cutting many student residents off from the network for a few days. My understanding is that the meeting between the Comcast rep and the head of campus IT was an instance of legendary restraint on the part of our IT head (in that everyone left the room with all their limbs still attached). (I'm sure it helped the uni's bargaining position a lot that we were in a metropolitan area; Verizon was champing at the bit to get those accounts).

fixermark 12y ago

My university was apparently grandfathered into that category (for their off-property students) when the local ISP company was bought by Comcast; the original provider had put the uni into their "Other" billing category as it was a special off-rate annually-negotiated contract, and when they unified the IT systems they got moved into that "billed 0" category in Comcast's backend. Yep, sure enough, an automatic cleaning script came along and killed all those cost-0 connections, cutting many student residents off from the network for a few days. My understanding is that the meeting between the Comcast rep and the head of campus IT was an instance of legendary restraint on the part of our IT head (in that everyone left the room with all their limbs still attached). (I'm sure it helped the uni's bargaining position a lot that we were in a metropolitan area; Verizon was champing at the bit to get those accounts).