What’s going on with Comcast? The behemoth cable provider is routinely voted the worst company in America for customer service. Now they’ve been caught changing a customer’s first name from Ricardo to “Asshole”. They left his last name, Brown, as-is. Go figure.

This was discovered when the customer received his statement in the mail. He learned about this name change on a 30 day past due notice.

What will they change his name to when he goes 60 days past due?

Comcast is blaming a rogue employee for the incident and they claim to have fired that employee. I find it heard to believe that Comcast doesn’t have failsafes in place that stop something like this. By changing the name of the customer, they’ve modified the contract, making it invalid and unenforceable. A name change on an account requires an addendum to the original contract. It’s essentially putting the bill in someone else’s name.

Ricardo Brown no longer owes any money to Comcast, Asshole Brown does.

Comcast is just a terrible company. They owe their customer base not to the excellent products and service they offer, but to the fact that they are the only game in town. They offer cable TV and broadband, high-speed Internet delivered over coax cable. They enjoy a monopoly over control of the coax cable running to people’s homes.

Companies without competition are almost universally terrible. No greater example of this is the local cable TV provider.

We get our TV from Dish Network. One of the reasons Dish Network is so awesome is that they have DirecTv to compete with. DirecTv tries to corner the satellite TV market by bribing the NFL to be the sole provider of out-of-market games. Dish Network competes with DirecTV by offering the best DVR on the market. The point is, the two satellite TV providers have each other to compete with.

Comcast has nobody to compete with. If you live in an area where Comcast is in control of the coax, you either go with them, or you don’t have cable TV.