Bad Comcast service? Call CEO’s mom!

I GREW UP in a neighborhood where even the really bad kids could be brought back in line when someone tattled on them to their moms. That's why I picked up the phone on Thursday and called the 92-year-old mother of Comcast Corporation's chairman and CEO Brian Roberts.

We all know that Roberts' company has been very, very bad. Comcast is in the news every other day with another irate customer's tale of horrible treatment from the behemoth cable provider.

Last week, for instance, somebody at Comcast changed the first name of a customer from "Ricardo" to "A--hole" on the final bill sent to him.

Why so nasty?

His wife had canceled their Comcast service.

Then there was customer Ryan Block, held phone hostage for 18 minutes by a crazed Comcast "retention specialist" (a Comcast euphemism for a--hole?) who refused Block's request to cancel his services. Block recorded the Kafkaesque babble and posted it on the Web, where it has been streamed a bajillion times.

And should you crave more examples of Comcast's contempt for the Little Guy, click the "like" button on Facebook's "I Hate Comcast" page and lose yourself in users' creative tales of frustration - like Joel Walden's satirical "Ode to Comcast." The 20-stanza poem about Comcast's inability to give a crap ends with resigned acceptance:

So let us not dwell endlessly On how much Comcast sucks;

Their neglect and lazy service,

And their non-arriving trucks.

Their apathy's intentional,

So don't get mad or nervous.

Just go on and grab those ankles,

It's all part of that Comcast service!

But the story that made me tattle on Brian Roberts to his mom was the one shared via an email sent to me by a sweet young couple named Diana and Jason Airoldi, recent Philly transplants from Washington, D.C. They've been trying since Dec. 23 to get Comcast to hook them up.

That's right. In almost the same amount of time it took Noah to float the Ark, the country's biggest cable company and home Internet-service provider hasn't been able to turn on the Internet and cable in the Airoldis humble South Street apartment.

"Our complex is a Comcast-only building, so it's not even like we can try a different cable company," says Diana, 33, who works in the hospitality industry. Jason, 38, works for the feds. "We have no choice but to use Comcast."

I could have called Charlie Herrin on the couple's behalf. He's Comcast's new head of "customer experience," appointed to "ensure that we are delighting our customers at each touch point," trilled Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit about Herrin's arrival. But Smit added that fixing the company's broken "customer experience" wouldn't happen overnight.

"In fact," he said, "it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we're known for."

A few years?

I imagined the Airoldis aging in place, their TV and computers rusting from disuse, the Super Bowls they'd miss, the unwatched seasons of "Downton Abbey" and "Scandal," the piled-up Vine videos.

And something in me cracked.

"Enough!" I said, furiously dialing Brian Roberts' mom (whose private number I wrangled from an insider). "It's time his mother hears what he's been up to!"

If anyone would take pity on the Airoldis, it would surely be Suzanne Roberts, lively wife of Comcast founder Ralph. She's also host of "Seeking Solutions With Suzanne," Comcast's talk show about life after 50.

Surely she had a solution for the Airoldis?

I was disappointed when Mrs. Roberts phone was answered not by her but by her very pleasant assistant, Sharon. I told her what the Airoldis had been through.

"I'm so sorry to hear that. I'll run this by Mrs. Roberts," said Sharon sympathetically.

Fewer than 18 hours later, I heard from Denise Daniele, the personal assistant of Ralph Roberts.

"How can I help?" she asked.

I described how Comcast had missed or messed up 14 appointments with the Airoldis. Told her about the 13 days of missed work, between them, waiting for cable technicians who never showed. The hours they'd spent on the phone explaining, again, what had gone wrong. The time that a customer-service rep told them their account had been deleted because they'd obviously "declined" to activate their service.

"That's awful, and totally unacceptable," said Daniele (a refrain the Airoldis heard every time they made a complaint to Comcast, to no avail). "I will call them and get this fixed."

Three hours later, Diana Airoldi called, breathless.

"I have never seen so many Comcast trucks in front of our building!" she said. "There's a couple technicians, there's a supervisor. They say they're going to fix this today! They're inside right now!"

And three hours after that - Holy Suzanne! - the Airoldis were finally connected. But their joy was tempered by the news, shared by a Comcast technician, that another Comcast customer would suffer because of the Airoldis' good fortune.

"He said that they had to cancel someone else to take care of us," says Jason.

What a spiteful thing to tell a customer.

I'll admit that I never imagined that, in helping the Airoldis, I'd unwittingly screw someone else out of the opportunity to wait for a technician to not show up.

As for Jason, he feels bad that someone else will have to wait a few more days for service.

"But after 14 missed appointments, an adjustment needed to be made," he says. "Maybe this is unfair to someone else, but Comcast needed to think about that a long time ago."

Phone: 215-854-2217

On Twitter: @RonniePhilly

Blog: ph.ly/RonnieBlog