As we’ve seen in the past, it can be really, really hard to cancel your Comcast service. TwinCities.com brings us the story of a man from St. Paul, Minnesota whose entire house tragically burned to the ground, leaving nothing behind… except for his Comcast service and the prospect of being billed for it.

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66-year-old Jimmy Ware’s lost everything inside his house when it caught fire last Wednesday. Despite this, it took him and his daughter Jessica Schmidt nearly a full week to get his Comcast account cancelled.

“When… Schmidt had called Comcast for her father, customer service representatives asked for Ware’s account number, saying they needed that to cancel his cable,” TwinCities.com writes. “‘Gone in the fire,’ Schmidt told them. Ware got on the line and provided the last four digits of his Social Security number, which Comcast told him was still not enough.”

After four phone calls, Schmidt gave Comcast an ultimatum: Either cancel her father’s account or send someone out to the wreckage of the house to fix his service. The Comcast customer service rep she spoke with told her that kind of service call was impossible because it’s pretty tough to service a ruined house… and yet they still wouldn’t cancel the account.

On Tuesday, Schmidt got a call from Comcast’s corporate office, which apologized and cancelled her father’s service.

In a statement, Comcast explained that it has “safeguards in place to protect the privacy of our customers, including not allowing unauthorized users to make changes to a customer’s account,” although it’s not clear why this would apply in this instance since Ware himself actually got on the phone with a Comcast rep and gave them the last four digits of his Social Security number. No matter: The mysteries of Comcast customer service practices are best not contemplated too deeply by mere mortals, whose limited intelligence can’t comprehend such strange and alien phenomena.

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This article was originally published on BGR.com