I received a bright yellow letter in the mail today from Comcast. It was a “Pending Disconnect Notice”. Comcast is my high-speed Internet provider and technically they have been quite good. The customer service is another story. After looking in Quicken, I found that I had somehow made the payment late. I assume the notice went out before they got the payment posted. I went to comcast.com to see if everything was ok. The homepage said “You are just a few clicks away from managing your Comcast Cable and/or Comcast High-Speed Internet account online. Sign up now — it’s fast, easy and free”! I registered successfully and then clicked on “Simply add your account number to your profile and you’ll have online access to your account information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” Great! I am on the way to confirming they received my payment.
One of the fields of information requested in the “Add Account” feature was the account number. “Enter the account number exactly as it appears on your bill including spaces and dashes”. I did not have a bill handy but I had the yellow letter and it had my account number on it. It said Account Number: 0032762-01 so that is what I entered. An error message appeared saying “Please enter your account number exactly as it appears on your bill”. After another couple of tries, I dug out an old bill and saw that the account number on it was 0327003276201. Obviously related but not exactly the same. Comcast wants me to be consistent, even though they aren’t. I entered the number yet again — exactly the way they wanted it. Then I got the following message.
“We’re Sorry. Although you are a current Comcast customer, online account management features are not available in your area. We are working hard to upgrade our systems to provide these features to all of our customers. Please check back again soon. On Demand. Not.
