I still hate Comcast
December 13th, 2007 • chatter
Another week, another outage. 3rd week in a row that we’ve had a 2hr+ outage in the middle of the day…around the same time of day. Of course, we’re still paying Comcast — which might end up changing — so they’re in no hurry to really figure out what’s going on. Today was another “major” outage just like last week’s was. If they’re so major, why are they happening every week? Why isn’t there enough redundancy in place to handle failover in a crappy network (my real question is why there is no redundancy but that’s another time). I miss the days of regional ISPs that cared about customers. Here we’re stuck with two companies: AT&T/Bellsouth and Comcast. I’ve used both this year and suffered innumerable outages, all during work, very few outside of work. Neither are worth a damn but that’s all we have. Comcast keeps trying to upsell us to a business plan but has no counter argument to “Well, if we switch to the business plan and there’s another ‘major outage’ how is that going to be any different than now?”.
Given Comcast’s blissful amount of ignorance in a solution, I’m seeing the same thing practically dissolve my department at work. Out of the five of us, two actually care about fixing problems and getting more done to solve future problems, the other three are happily content just doing what’s required (which is slightly more than nothing at all). Efforts to implement more stringent spam filtering without clogging up our mail gateways was totally nixed due to a single typo I made in a filter — and fixed — and implementing SpamAssassin scanning directly into simscan/qmail has gone nowhere because the guy in charge of the gateways simply doesn’t have the time to look at why simscan is processing and handing off to SA but SA isn’t processing. Mandated workload versus project workload has simply shifted into clear favor of doing what’s required and putting digital band-aids on everything else, due to company-wide apathy to problems all our users are complaining about.
This has led me to entertain an offer from a company in California which is currently offering a slight pay increase but requires me moving out to the OC and footing the bill for quite a number of things even the pay increase wouldn’t allow me to afford, namely footing a high bill to move cross-country. The offer is not without its merits or upsides but right now, I’ve been offered the low-hanging fruit of more pay and reduced everything else. It’s a rather one-sided deal until the first of the year where it should flesh out more but we’ll see.