This morning, I woke up and tried to log onto my email over at Comcast.net. I had great connectivity; I could get to my gmail no problem, but the Comcast.net portal was not accessible.  The site was down.  Fine, it happens.

When I called to see what was up, I was put into an endless loop of “please consult our website.”  Well, Duh, I couldn’t do that!  And then when I tried to talk to a live person just to get an estimate of when things might be up and ready, and/or report the problem, I kept getting a “call back later” message.

So much for customer service and sharing information.

I get that sites will go down.  But when you are a service provider and host email that people depend on for doing their daily business, you’ve got to be able to respond when they call, and have some way to have a problem answered by a real person, when it doesn’t fit your metrics.  Sure, there’s a lot of silly and “Oh, it needs to be plugged in? I didn’t know that!” questions you’ll get, but that’s called Customer Service and that’s why I pay so much for this service.

I need the service, I pay for the service, and this means you also agree to provide the service and pick up the phone when I call because it’s not working.  I don;t expect you to be psychic and know when it’s down, but I do expect you to be able to respond when your site and my email are unavailable for at least 4 hours.

FiOS, you can’t come soon enough!