Originally published June 9, 2017.
Dearest Xfinity:
Not long ago, as my roommate was moving out, it fell upon me to have the utilities put in my name. My roommate had used your Xfinity Internet services, and he advised me, “Their Internet’s faster than the others’, but Xfinity is the devil.” I chose to give Xfinity the benefit of the doubt, assuming that “the devil” was mere hyperbole, and that your corporate headquarters were not nestled squarely in hell, administered by Satan from an elegant office with a good view of bubbling lava and sinners being flayed alive.
That assumption is now being challenged.
I started my quest for the internet by calling 1-800-XFINITY, where I was informed I would have to make a trip to the local Xfinity office.
And so I arrived at the Xfinity office twenty minutes from my apartment. Having spoken with the Xfinity representative on the phone, I was assured that the people here would give me everything I needed in order to set up my own Internet. Still operating under that naïve belief, I walked in the door and got in line. There I waited for perhaps forty-five minutes behind a queue of doleful folks shuffling along like shackled extras in a low-budget production of Les Miserables.
Eventually, I was called to one of the service stations. As the Xfinity employee there wrote down my information, a distressed-looking woman hovered behind me.
“Can I help you?” my Xfinity employee said to the woman behind me.
“Yes,” said the woman with a frown, “my cable box doesn’t work.”
“You’ll have to get in the back of the line,” said the Xfinity drone.
“I already waited in line today for an hour,” said the woman, struggling to maintain her calm, “and was told the cable box should work. Then I got in line again and they told me someone would come by my house in two weeks. Can I just get a new one now? I’m already here.”
“Get in line again and we’ll take a look at it,” said the Xfinity person.
“Go ahead and help her,” I said to the Xfinity person, mostly because the woman was looking at the Xfinity person as one might regard a burglar rifling through one’s safe deposit box in the middle of the night. If the woman had been exposed to gamma radiation, she would have already turned green, grown in size, and demolished the office.
“No, she needs to get in line,” said the Xfinity person, who finished giving me a packet of equipment and disappeared into the back, possibly to check on the giant cloning facility where they grow and program Xfinity employees.
I left, giving an apologetic glance to the fuming woman. Surely that sorry kind of customer service was a fluke, I thought. At home, I started to set up my Internet and realized Xfinity had not given me a router. After calling the automated helpline several times, I was told to go back to the Xfinity office and pick one up. Because I was about to leave for the Fourth of July holiday, I delayed until the next week, assuring my roommates that soon we would have Internet again and we could go back to our regular routine of streaming Gilmore Girls together while telling people we were actually watching Fast & Furious XVII: The Fast and the Führer-ious (the one where they build time-traveling sports cars to steal Hitler’s gold).
Several days later, I returned to the Xfinity office. This time, there were even more forlorn-looking people in line than there had been the first time—like the waiting room of an oncologist’s office, except without all the rampant optimism. I thought back to Dante’s Inferno and the famous sign over the entrance to hell that reads, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But surely it wouldn’t be that bad. I’d wait a while, get a router, and go home. Like Hercules, I would brave the underworld and return with my prize.
I waited for about an hour and a half. If I had been a common mayfly, which lives about twenty-four hours, I would have just wasted about a sixteenth of my life in the Xfinity line, and my mayfly girlfriend would have run off with some other mayfly with a bigger thorax.
At last, they called my name. “I’m here to pick up a router and Ethernet cable,” I told the Xfinity employee, who was—to my dismay—the same employee who had reacted so coldly to the woman’s plight a few days earlier. (Or perhaps it was just a clone, and my theory about Xfinity employees being mass-produced somewhere was correct.)
“We’re all out of routers,” said the clone.
“I see,” I replied. Because this was exactly the answer I had been hoping for after waiting in line for 1.5 hours, I had to consider an appropriate response, by which I mean one that would not land me in jail. I asked, “What would you like me to do?”
“Call 1-800-XFINITY,” said the clone, dismissing me.
Imagining the clone burned to ash with lasers from my eyes, I left without another word. On the way home, I called the number.
“Thank you for calling Xfinity,” said the automated voice. “For billing and payment, press 1. For technical help, press 2. For more options, press 3.”
Wondering which button to push to submit a profanity-laden tirade, I pressed 2. A heavily accented voice eventually answered, and I explained my situation, including the long wait at the Xfinity office and my increasingly distant hope of receiving a router.
“I see,” said the customer service representative. “You need a router. Let me see what I can do for you.” After a minute of crackly on-hold music that bore a strange resemblance to early-2000s modem static, she returned. “You can pick one up at your nearest Xfinity office,” she said.
At this point, it was a good thing that thousands of miles and several circles of hell probably separated me from the representative. Speaking slowly, I said, “That’s where I just came from. They were out. And they told me to call you.”
“I see,” said the representative, who, as I was beginning to suspect, was one of the rejects from the latest batch of Xfinity clones, one of those whose growth tube had malfunctioned in mid-production. “Let me put you on hold.”
After a minute so, the line went dead, at which point I called CenturyLink.
I now have several suggestions for you to improve customer service:
First, hire more people to work during peak hours so we don’t have to wait in line for an hour and a half. Surely there are homeless people who will work for minimum wage, especially if all they have to do is tell people you’re out of routers or just can’t help.
Second, set up some kind of system when people check in so we know that at the end of our wait you might actually be able to help.
Third, re-read this letter approximately eighty times. You wasted about four hours of my time—I waited in line, drove so I could wait in line, and waited as I could be placed on hold—so I think it only fair that you spend an equal amount of time engaged in similarly meaningless pursuits. (If you finish reading this letter the specified number of times before the four-hour mark, consider gnawing your toes off. This would not help overall productivity, but it would still be more helpful than the service rendered by most of your employees I have encountered, and it would definitely make me feel better.)
I don't expect a reply, of course—I'm sure your upper management is busy, perhaps engaged in a fiddling competition over somebody's soul in Georgia or something.
Thank you for your time. Don’t forget to block out the next four hours or so.
Sincerely,
Ryan
