Early on Friday afternoon, construction workers severed our Comcast cable connection. If you want to know how dependent – and hooked – you are on your cable service, just unplug it for a while. This wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t Comcast’s fault. The maintenence workers who cut the line were trying to fix a water problem in the neighborhood. But, they just packed it in for the weekend and went home to their cable TV, movies on demand, surfing the web and V O I P phones. The first appointment we could get was Sunday morning. No contact with the outside world for 2 days.

Sunday morning came and went without the cable guy. According to Comcast, there was no Sunday appointment scheduled. But, he could see one on Monday. So, we wait some more. We watched a movie on DVD. We played a game. We even took down the Christmas tree. I was out of patience. I went to McDonald’s to try to get my email. I could send but not receive with their WiFi. So, that was a wasted trip.

But, there was no appointment on Monday either. Now, the appointment is Friday. FRIDAY! That’s a whole week without service. And who keeps changing the appointment? Must be Comcast.

We called and tried to reason with Comcast.

• It’s a cleanly cut line.
• It’ll only take 5 minutes to splice it back together.
• We have disabled people in the house.
• They have no way to call for help if needed.

But, Comcast wouldn’t make an exception. Time to call in the reserves. We called Mike, who’s in charge of maintenance for the community. Mike offered to call Comcast on our behalf. And Mike got results. Comcast would send someone out today to splice the cable – TODAY!

The cable guy was the nicest, most polite and friendliest technician I’ve met in a long time. He was a far cry from the Comcast customer service reps we’d been dealing with for 3 days. It didn’t take him long and we were back online. He even checked each TV, computer and phone to be sure we were completely online before he left. We owe him and Mike a big thank you for understanding our situation and taking action.

I learned an important lesson from this. Be polite, but be persistent. Be assertive, but not aggressive. And if you can’t resolve the issue, enlist help. There’s always a solution. Sometimes you just have to be creative.

How do you solve problems? Share your experience in a comment.