By the end of my three-and-a-half hours dealing with Comcast customer service on Tuesday, I had just about lost my mind. Between repeated disconnections, a borked call-transfer system, conflicting information, a surprise $40 fee, and the eventual discovery that I had been misquoted available speeds, I had a pounding stress headache.

We've seen many horror stories about Comcast service in the past few years, ranging from awful cancellation call recordings to official mail being sent with customers' names changed to such endearing terms as "dummy" and "whore." But sometimes, the pain points don't involve a punchy, headline-worthy moment. Sometimes, dealing with Comcast—especially when they're the only high-speed pony in town—just grinds you down.

Giga what?

Last month, I was living the Seattle dream—at least in terms of Internet speed. I'd been enjoying unbridled gigabit service from Centurylink for most of 2015, thanks to the regional telco's expanded fiber reaching my neighborhood. The service came at a great price: about $70/month for 100Mbps download and upload or $110/month to crank that up to 1,000Mbps both ways. I dumped my old Comcast account and signed up immediately, and I went full gig, not because I needed to but because I could.

My speedy era ended in June, however, when I had to move. Seattle's recent real estate boom has produced a string of rent hikes and "renovation" evictions, and I faced both at my old place. Move out for a few months, then pay 33 percent higher rent to move back in? No thanks.

Thankfully, I found a new, lovely, reasonably priced apartment, but it came with one caveat: Centurylink's high-speed fiber hadn't arrived yet, nor had fiber service from West Coast Internet company Wave. The apartment already had an Internet account with Comcast, but the building's neighbors soon let me know what I was in for, commenting on frequent outages they have noticed over the years. "Has gigabit gotten here yet?" they asked, knowing that I'm a tech writer who keeps tabs on such things. Not yet, I replied.







Still, as I planned my move-in, I got my hopes up. Comcast's site advertised its "Blast" Internet tier in my region, rated at 150Mbps download. At only $50 a month for the first 12 months, that worked for me. It wasn't gigabit, but it was still fast.

The new apartment was already wired for Comcast, so I picked up the phone, and an activation sales rep talked me through the activation process. For total clarity, I asked about each of the following points multiple times and received affirmative answers:

My old cable modem from a prior Comcast account, rated for DOCSIS 3.0, would support the advertised speeds with no issue.

I wouldn't have to pay other installation or monthly fees beyond a $6 installation charge.

I would receive a Blast speed promotion at speeds rated 150Mbps down/25Mbps up.

When the service went live, however, I wondered if I had reached the "up to" asterisk when it comes to Comcast's advertised speeds. My speedtest.net tests measured only 55/6—still decent but only a third of what I was supposed to get. My hopes that this was a temporary issue were foiled when tests through the night and the following morning all had the same speeds. Back to the phone.

A bullet I could bite

After trying and failing to find an "activation department" option in my first call (one in which the automatic system hung up on me), I made a second call to a tech-support rep who firmly and repeatedly told me why I had speed issues: my cable modem was not compatible with Comcast's higher speeds. Even worse, she said, the modem in question was never activated on Comcast's end. My account didn't really exist, and my connection shouldn't be working.

Given that I had logged in with a username and password the day before and that I was currently calling her over WiFi, this seemed... unlikely.

But there was no way to fix it, the rep replied. The modem simply wouldn't work. I'd have to buy or lease a new one, but my account had already been created as if I'd had a working modem, so...

She paused.

"Maybe the activation department can help?" I asked. I was given a toll-free number.

After entering in personal information and making some choices, I heard tones as if I were being forwarded to a human, but I was instead answered by another "Welcome to Comcast!" phone system message. This asked me to pick from a few options, then began automatically dialing nine numbers in rapid succession, as if someone on the other end was mashing phone buttons. The phone call disconnected. I called back and got the same results. What in the world?

I called the general tech support line instead. This resulted in a 50-minute call in which I was put on hold six times while a rep figured out that yes—despite what I had just been told—I could in fact use my modem. Huzzah!

But then came the hitch: when I had closed my last Comcast account and asked about returning the modem, I had been misinformed. (I had been told that the modem did not in fact need to be returned.) I was supposed to have returned the modem to Comcast; a $40 collections charge in my name was proof. If I paid the $40 that day, the rep said, the modem would immediately unlock for use. If I didn't pay, the Internet connection to my modem would soon be shut off.

How Comcast failed to inform me of this six-month-old charge remained a mystery; this was the company that had robocalled me every three hours when I had an overdue bill, after all.

Paying $40 seemed like a bullet I could bite to get on with my life. I would be transferred to collections, the rep told me, and then she would call me back in 10 minutes to finish activation. So I made a $40 payment, hung up, and waited for the return call.

40 minutes passed. I sighed and called back.