I’m done with this moving thing …
Well, I’m done moving now pretty much. I still need to unpack some things, but I’m totally out of the old place and have turned in the keys for it, etc. It’s been both a good and a bad experience.
I had originally hired Starving Students to do the move for me. I had scheduled the move with them in March. The local office was supposed to call me about two weeks before the move in order to get the specifics, confirm the date & time, etc. Well, about 1 week before the move, I still hadn’t heard from them so I called the local office. They said I was in the system but had been canceled for some reason. “Luckily” they still had room for me on the day I had planned to move, so he went ahead and uncanceled me and proceeded to go over the pricing. Most of it was what I’d already been told. It would have a 2 hour minimum, 1 hour on top of that, $75/hr, and then he told me there’d also be a 9.5% charge on top of the total cost for fuel. The fuel charge really didn’t make sense to me. I just don’t understand why a percentage on the total move would be added for fuel. Makes no sense in my opinion.
Luckily, I had talked to a neighbor a night or so before and he told me about a company he was using, Kid Gloves Moving & Storage. He said they’d treated him well and worked really fast. I called them and scheduled my move. That was one, of few good decisions I made through-out the process I later learned. They were great. They had told me to be ready to let them start moving me by 8am. They arrived at 7:50am, took a quick look around the apartment and started taking action. It was 3 guys, and none of them stopped moving until everything was packed. They followed me over to the new place, took a quick look at the inside, and then they started moving me in. They were finished moving me by 9:45am. That’s just shy of 2 hours for a cross-town move. No walls were touched, no items were broken, they were extremely professional.
The only hitch in the actual move itself was that the box spring for my bed couldn’t fit upstairs. So for the past week I’ve been trying different remedies. For the first couple of nights I just put the mattress on the floor. Then I had some slats cut for the bed, but they were constantly falling out (which can be quite loud on a hardwood floor). Then finally I found a bed store close by that was able to sell me a split-queen box spring. So tonight, basically a week after moving, I will finally be sleeping in a real bed. I’m pretty excited about that.
Until Friday (2 days ago), I was unable to get WiFi up in my new home. I’ve determined that Comcast is perfect example of how evil corporations can become in this country. When the technician came out to my house to do the “install” he was rushing everything. He also had obviously not been told anything about why he was at my home. I had all of my equipment, it was just a transfer of service. I even had everything hooked up, all he should have really needed to do is “flip the switch” that gave my home service, and then verify that everything worked. Well, in his impatience, he decided to swap my cable modem, because the one I already had was taking too long to sync up (he gave it all of about 1 minute max). Well, he swapped it out, we finally got it to sync, and plugged it into my Macbook, and with a little playing around, it was able to surf the web. Shortly after he left. I figured it would be no problem to then get it working with my wireless router. After all, I’m a pretty resourceful guy when it comes to “computer stuff” and all that. Well, my router couldn’t pull an IP off the cable modem. So for the past week I have had to take my laptop over to my cable modem and plug it in directly whenever I wanted on the internet for something (pretty much all the time). I tried all sorts of things, powering everything down, bringing it up one device at a time, making sure things were powered off for the “10 count”, all the typical trouble shooting stuff including making sure my router was cloning my Macbook’s MAC address.
Well, Friday night, I’d had enough. Thursday before I went to bed I had unplugged and powered off every device. When I came home Friday, I slowly turned on each device, giving each device some time to “boot” before bringing the next item on. It still wouldn’t pull an IP. So I called customer service. Ugh, I’m still so flustered from the experience that I don’t think I can explain it all here. Basically, I ended up having to call in 6 times before I finally was able to talk to a supervisor. No one was able to help me. While on the phone all night with them, it magically started working somehow. I have no idea what finally allowed it to happen
Basically, I’ve asked them to credit my account for 1 months worth of service (roughly $200) and I intend to seek out services to replace all things I’m currently paying Comcast for. I’ve had nothing but poor experiences with them for the past year, and I pay them way too much money each month to put up with it. I imagine I’ll just be outright canceling my home phone service, and I’m going to see if I can get DSL to replace the cable modem. As for television, FiOS isn’t offered in my area yet, so I may try to check out some of the Dish Network-ish type providers and see if I can replace them there as well. I just see no need to be paying so much money per month for what can’t even be called sub-standard customer support. It disgusts me.
Tags: comcast, moving, rant, review, starvingstudents
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