SEATTLE—On Friday night, I showed up at the predetermined location just a few blocks from a Seattle pier. I hopped some shrubs, showed up at the keypad-locked door, and waited for my insider, Dave, to grant me access, all the while remembering our agreed-upon story: I was a paralegal, and we had recently met playing pick-up basketball. "Let's keep it simple," he'd told me over the phone earlier that day.

This all seemed like overkill, just to sneak me into an apartment pizza party, but my anonymous source was a little nervous. The party was being hosted by Comcast. Was he overdue on his bill or something?

"My building is a little weird about these residents-only events," Dave explained as he let me in. Then he added, "I don't use Comcast, anyway."

That was the whole point of his invite. Comcast enjoys a near-monopoly for high-speed Internet service in the states that it operates in, and the company only seems to pipe up with competitive initiatives when a competitor shows up. When Google Fiber announced its intentions in cities like Provo, UT, and Kansas City, MO, Comcast responded with price drops and speed hikes.

In Seattle, however, the Internet competition is pretty thin. CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) offers piddly, low-priced DSL service, while the area's fastest provider, CondoInternet, provides gigabit speeds via fiber... but almost exclusively to condos and apartment complexes. Hence, my eyebrows went skyward when I saw an area reddit alert about Comcast posting flyers at two apartment complexes—one of which is connected to CondoInternet—advertising pizza, beer, and giveaways.

This was Comcast's Seattle response to CondoInternet? This I had to see.

Does extra cheese require an equipment lease?

Seattle's redditors didn't take long to mock the apartment parties pretty relentlessly, particularly their timespans, as if they'd been announced by a Comcast technician. "6-8pm is a small window... I can be there between 9am and 11pm?" one user wrote, while others joked that attendees should expect an annoying party-bundling upsell: "Pizza will be bundled with non-optional two liters of soft drinks, dessert pizzas, and wings, and you by default rent the silverware and plates. That package will cost $7 for the first 30 minutes of the party and then $15 indefinitely, increasing by about 10 percent every five minutes."

As it turns out, the party I attended was mostly a blink-and-miss-it event. It took place in the apartment complex's lounge, complete with coolers full of drinks (beer and soda), a plate full of small cupcakes, and a dozen boxes of pizza from pricey, tasty local chain Pagliacci.

Two Comcast staffers were on hand with laminate badges attached to their hips but no Comcast shirts or other identifying marks. A small table next to the fridge was covered in freebies like post-it notes, pens, and car phone chargers, all emblazoned with Comcast logos, along with a few promotional pamphlets and three raffle prizes: two baskets full of candy, and a Beats By Dre Bluetooth speaker system. Everyone who came in was given a raffle ticket. (I gave mine to Dave.)

While nursing a beer (FULL DISCLOSURE: FREE COMCAST BEER, I TOTALLY HAD A SLICE OF PEPPERONI TOO #ethics), I spoke to Dave, a Seattle native, for a few minutes about Internet service. His spiel was pretty simple: CondoInternet offers more speed at a competitive rate, both upload and download, than Comcast currently offers in the Seattle area, and he's had no issues with billing or service. Anecdotally, he has heard far more horror stories about Comcast than the smaller, local option, and that combination of factors made his Internet service choice pretty simple.

A few minutes later, I faked like a building resident and grilled one of the Comcast reps. Anthony, a 20-something whose green braces could be seen through his constant smiles, was incredibly approachable, and it was obvious someone in the marketing department knew better than to encourage heaping servings of bullshit. I mentioned CondoInternet's price and performance combination, and Anthony got to the point: "You know, I'm human," he said. "If there's something that works better for you, you gotta take it."

He confirmed that his team began throwing similar parties at other Seattle apartment buildings a few weeks ago, but he wouldn't cop to CondoInternet being a leading reason for doing so. "We're just talking to people to hear what they want and what their concerns are," he said, and he said a lot of feedback he's received has been about users wanting competitive upload speeds.

Worth noting, during our five-minute conversation, Anthony didn't once mention television service. He wanted to hear my Internet-specific concerns, and he seemed like an actual human being. He even made a joke about wondering how he'd be received, pretending to duck under cover and look anxiously around.

Delivery in 30 minutes, or your HBO is free!

Still, it's hard to imagine Comcast really needing to serve pizza and beer to get honest feedback about services, prices, and customer service woes. In a phone interview, Dave Shurley, Comcast's vice president of marketing in the Northwest, added that this party should have had an X1 kiosk on site, as well, to show off the company's new video platform. "It’s a very experiential product," Shurley said. "To touch and feel it is fantastic, along with mobile apps. It’s hard to advertise those products in 30 seconds. But if you give someone an iPad and let them go, they enjoy it."

Shurley said that these parties are a Seattle-specific initiative, as opposed to a national one, as a response to "so much growth in Seattle in apartment complexes." (The city has certainly seen an explosion in new residents and condo construction, particularly thanks to rampant Amazon hiring. Locals are none too happy about it, but that's another conversation entirely.)

I asked Shurley to respond to complainants on sites like reddit, and while he didn't mention specific price or service issues, he mentioned a lot of work on infrastructure and insisted that "we've boosted our speeds 12 times in the past several years." He also put the parties in perspective, for anyone who might complain that Comcast's money could be better spent elsewhere: "These parties are in coordination with the apartment complexes. Funding them is nominal. Our real investment is in the products we're bringing our customers."

The way we see it, Comcast would be wiser to pull back on the pizza budget and go to where the loudest complainers live. Besides, if Comcast ever pulled the trigger on a reddit ask-me-anything thread, we'd put the pizza away for a far more appropriate snack: the popcorn.