| 26 June 2004 at 01.45.07 ZuluTime
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Posted by Gremlin [67.176.3.48 - ] on 26 June 2004 at 01.45.07 ZuluTime:
Believe it or not, this is still a fucking issue.
These idiots, pending fines and probably prison time, fixed this place up in somewhat over the twenty-five hours they had left [getting the ceiling pastered over and painted pushed it to about thirty-six hours, in the end] by doing exactly the minimum required to meet the deadline. Which is to say that they only replaced what was broken, and not the forty-year-old copper pipes next to the broken ones.
So, it happened again. And not just here. Apparently, by replacing the totally destroyed pipe six weeks ago, the hydraulic pressue of the two-hundred-degree water surged out evenly across more pipes in here, as well as every other such pipe in the building. So everyone had this boiling water leaking in on them through the asbestos until yesterday.
To date, I've been plotting out a potential lawsuit over this shit, while kinda wondering whether the company reponsible for it actually had the money to pay me. Information, incidentally, that I should have in a couple of hours; I handed that research off to someone else. But, given this new development, I no longer care whether they have the money, or whether they could try to hide it behind some limited liability scam. As of Monday, armed with the final bit of information [the corporation's actual assets], and pending another headache [I'm trying to get over one at the moment, having stayed awake for forty-odd hours this time, trying to figure out what these twits were going to do about the 'new' problem], I'm moving ahead and suing these imbeciles into extinction.
Just me. Rumours of a ClassAction notwithstanding. Although, to the best of my knowledge, suing them privately and joining a separate ClassAction in no way equates to double jeopardy; I should be legally able to do both. Maybe I will.
Then, having sued them, and having proved beyond a reasonable doubt that, in addition to Criminal Negligence, Reckless Endangerment, Attractive Nuisance, and every other crime these idiots have been observed committing [I'm counting the damned headaches as Mental Anguish; my neurologist will back me on that one], they've utterly breached my contract--the lease--handing me a Get out of Hell Free Card, I'm probably going to use it to move someplace real in which this shit doesn't happen, and in which, given that Comcast just decided to charge me yet another ten bucks a month for having five IP Addresses for five online computers after assuring me that I could have all the IPs I wanted for free when I signed up, and then cutting the service for six hours the other night, telling Hunter that my cablemodem was broken, that they'd have to send a guy out on Saturday to fix it for several hundred bucks...this is a story on its own; it's not gonna fit in to parenthetical remarks....
Wednesday night, the New&Improved MoreExpensive CableModem stopped working. Hunter called 1800COMCAST in the first several seconds of downtime, sat on hold for half an hour, finally got to an idiot to report the outage, and got told that the modem was broken, and that we'd have to wait until Saturday at noon for a guy to come out and charge us more to fix it than it would cost to replace it. She gave me the phone.
GREMLIN: 'Okay; what's the problem, exactly?'
FRAUD: 'Well, as I tried to tell her, your modem is broken, so we'll have to send someone out to fix it. The earliest we can get out there is Saturday between ten and noon. Is that okay for you?'
GREMLIN: 'No. Because my modem isn't broken.'
FRAUD: 'Well, Sir, our diagnostics report that it is.'
GREMLIN: 'Okay. Go ahead and send someone out on Saturday. If, before then, my unbroken modem manages to become magically still unbroken and your service is resurrected, I'll call you and let you know about it.'
FRAUD: 'Great. I'll schedule your repair for Saturday between ten and noon.'
GREMLIN: 'And, if before then, I switch to a company who isn't out to defraud a chick who calls at three in the morning, I'll call you and let you know about that, too.'
FRAUD: 'Uh...oh, hang on. It looks like it's just an outage. You'll be back online by six'.
GREMLIN: [to Hunter] 'He says you were right and he was wrong: the modem's fine; it's an outage; he's sorry he tried to scam you.'
FRAUD: 'Uh, we'll have you back online as soon as possible, Sir.'
GREMLIN: 'Good. Bye.'
FRAUD: 'Uh, thanks for using Com--' Click.
Well: Beep, actually. You can't really slam down a mobile phone; I've tried.
I forgot to ask why they'd planned an outage which would end exactly at six. Not that it mattered: I was back online before five. Still, I don't like companies who try to charge luddites hundreds of bucks at random. Especially ones dumb enough to think that Hunter is a fucking luddite.
Anyway: given all this fraud and negligence, I'm way in the market to find a new place to live. I'll let you know what comes of that as it happens, of course....
--Gremlin