The best exchange I’ve ever had with a Comcast customer service rep.

This time I last week, I was home sick AND neck-deep in my Momma-mourning. The only thing I wanted to do – like, seriously, the ONLY THING – was to watch The Good Wife through On Demand. Some sports something-or-other had messed up my DVR recording on Sunday night, because it ran over. (Good Wife fans know EXACTLY what I’m talking about, because it used to happen almost every week.)

Anyway.

Joe left for work and I settled in on the couch. Only, I couldn’t access that episode of The Good Wife. Something was wrong, the error message told me, but it should be corrected shortly.

I went to do something else.

An hour later, I tried again. Still wasn’t working. I tried to access a different episode of The Good Wife. None of those worked either. I tried another show altogether. No go. On Demand simply wasn’t working.

I logged onto my Comcast account hoping to message with a virtual customer service rep. Instead, I was told that there was an outage reported in my area expected to be fixed by noon.

I went to do some other things.

At 12:30, I checked my online account. Still down.

At 3:30, I saw that service had been restored. I went to watch The Good Wife.

I still couldn’t access it.

A new message appeared online saying that some people were still having difficulties with their service. Unplug the box, it said. Count to 30, then plug it back in. This will restore service.

It didn’t.

Now, I was heated. I accessed the virtual customer service rep and unleashed a little of that heat on him. His responses were like nothing I’d ever seen. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Even though I was being so snarky, Francis never lost his cheerfulness. In fact, he would say things like, “We will be fixing it. We are a great team, Lara!”

Eventually Francis sent a signal to the box and that woke it up. I don’t have screenshots of this next part but here’s what happened:

• LARA_ > It works! It works! It works!
• LARA_ > Thank you, Francis!
• Francis > Great!
• Francis > Heaven touches us on that part!
• Francis > Now you will be able to watch your Good Wife episodes!

I was sending Joe the screenshots of our exchange as it was going on, in part because my enthusiastic new friend made me smile. I can honestly say I’d never had a better interaction with a Comcast customer service rep EVER.

Funny post script to this story:

When I first realized that On Demand was down, I tweeted something about it. Five days later, I got the following response:

It’s an interesting strategy – having the customer service reps tweet from what looks more like a personal account.

But, um, way to be on top of things, @ComcastCares. (Five days? Really?)