Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles

I just had a completely reasonable interaction with Comcast.

In order for this story to carry its necessary emotional weight, you must understand that we have never had a good relationship with Comcast. We bought internet from them because RCN does not offer service on our street, but our very first interactions with the company went like this and only deteriorated once we discovered that the cable package we had been sold did not, in fact, despite many promises to the contrary, include TCM, and wouldn't unless we were willing to pay even more for the channels it was bundled with, none of which were things we would ever watch; it took a lengthy, difficult phone call to cancel our cable without also stopping our internet service and for nearly a year afterward I had to field invasive, hectoring callbacks from sales representatives who wanted me to reinstate the cable package and wouldn't take no for an answer. (Randomly, too. I got one once while we were having dinner at Snappy Pattys.)

This evening I got back from Marlborough (orthodontist's appointment; went fine) to find a letter from Comcast informing me that I had until Friday to pay our internet bill before they disconnected our service and charged me a nasty amount to reinstate it. I had paid the bill. I put the check in the mail a week ago Sunday. I had written it off my mental list of debts to attend to. I was not happy.

So I called Comcast. I got a customer service representative named Trina. And she listened to me. She was sympathetic to my concern that the check had been delayed by Boston's recurring snow-poleaxed shutdowns; she agreed with me that it was not the best plan to bank on a check put in the mail in Somerville on Wednesday reaching Comcast's billing center in New Jersey by Friday. She called over to collections and arranged for the payment deadline to be extended by a week, confirmed that overpaying a bill just turns into a credit on the subscriber's account, and recommended that I just put a new check in the mail. Whichever one arrives first will pay off the bill; the second one will pre-pay our bill by a couple of months. If the first check never arrives, then at least the second has us covered. She wasn't from or in Boston and she'd heard about the blizzards.

I have written the new check and it is sitting on the dining room table, waiting to be mailed tomorrow. I thanked Trina very much. She is my single best experience with Comcast, possibly even more than the service representative in 2013 who spent more than half an hour on the phone with derspatchel trying to find us a way to watch TCM without exorbitant cost. (She couldn't find one, which is why we canceled our cable, but she was sympathetic and honest and I remember her fondly, unlike the guy who called me in the middle of dinner.)

So that was nice.