Comcast Disconnected My Verizon, What Should I Do?

Here's an odd situation: Reader Stephen says that Comcast (his old cable company) disconnected his new Verizon cable. He's not sure what exactly he should do about it and would like your advice.

August 8th. 3pm. My Verizon cable service is disconnected. Both set top boxes are non-responsive, but my internet service is booming along. I reboot the Verizon equipment a few times over the next 3 hours, but it never comes back on. I call Verizon's "Fibre Solutions Center" and deal with some rather incompetent customer service. They blame me for rewiring my apartment. They say that they don't see any issues. They deactivate and reactive my cable boxes. They tell me there is no problem. They tell me that the cable boxes are broken. None of what they do works. Every call is ended with the representative telling me that my service "will be back within the hour". It never is. They send me 2 new cable boxes. They don't work. I called ever day from Friday to Monday. They refused to send out a technician because they didn't see the issue on their end. Finally after going up the chain I am told they can have someone out by Wednesday evening. This was not really that acceptable considering all of the Olympics I missed, but if they were sending someone out I should be happy.

In speaking with comcast today I am told that I shouldn't have received a bill for the month of September since my Comcast service was physically disconnected the evening of Aug 8. The rep gives me a little background and says that until they physically sever the connection, my service with Comcast continues. At that point I was no longer receiving Comcast signals over my coax. I was 100% Verizon.

On Wednesday, August 13th a Verizon technician arrives at my apartment. He is happy to say that he already found the problem. Someone with access to the LOCKED network closet disconnected me from the Verizon lines. That someone was not from Verizon I was told. That someone severed the lines without permission. Now I find out that that somone was a Comcast technician.

Where do I stand on this? What can I do? How do I get anything from Comcast on this? What should I do with Verizon. I am still going through executive customer service within both companies but I'm not sure what the exact implications of this happen to be.

We think you should call your local government and find out which department regulates cable in your area. File an official complaint against Comcast for disconnecting your cable and continuing to bill you after you had already switched to Verizon.

As far as getting compensation from your old cable company, we're not sure that you'll have much luck since you've severed your business relationship with Comcast. We're sure they'd love for you to switch back, but we suspect that you're not going to want to do that.

We'd concentrate on asking Verizon for a credit to compensate you for the service interruption rather than get into a bunch of "he said, she said" nonsense with the cable companies.

Has this happened to any of you? How did you handle it?

A Glossary of Incompetence

It could be argued that the world does not need a new science, but Laurence J. Peter, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, has invented one. He calls it hierarchiology, or the study of hierarchies in modern organizations. According to a satiric new book called The Peter Principle (Morrow; $4.95), which he wrote with the help of Canadian Freelancer Raymond Hull, the basic premise of hierarchiology is that "with few exceptions men bungle their affairs." The proof? Look at any large bureaucracy.

The "Peter Principle" states that "in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; the cream rises until it sours." People who show competence are promoted whether or not they are qualified to perform competently at the next level. Eventually they go beyond their limits, become incompetent, and stop getting promoted. Macbeth, a success as a military commander, rose to become an incompetent king. Which is to say, "nothing fails like success."

As Peter points out, hierarchies have several well-tested techniques to deal with men who have clearly been promoted beyond their level of competence. One method is:

The Lateral Arabesque, which is used by many managers in place of firing a misplaced employee. If an office supervisor fumbles frequently, he is made "coordinator of interdepartmental communications, supervising the filing of second copies of interoffice memos." This is similar to:

Percussive Sublimation, the pseudo-promotion commonly known as kicking a man upstairs. Because it appears to be yet another promotion for merit, percussive sublimation has the added benefit of justifying the executive who promoted the man to his level of incompetence in the first place. Both this principle and the lateral arabesque point up an inadequacy in C. Northcote Parkinson's well-known law. Work not only expands to fit the time allotted but, says Author Peter, "it can expand far beyond that."

Final Placement Syndrome is "what the ordinary sociologist calls 'success.' " Freud's theory that frustration arises from foibles such as penis envy, the Oedipus complex or the castration complex is nonsense, says Peter, who cheerfully regards Freud as a "satirist at heart." On the contrary, "frustration occurs as a result of promotion," because most people who are promoted genuinely wish to be productive.

A frequent symptom is Abnormal Tabulology, which is any unusual arrangement of the desk, such as Phonophilia (installing a panoply of telephones, pushbuttons, flashing lights and loudspeakers) or Papyrophobia (the "clean desk" syndrome, indulged in because "every piece of paper is a reminder of the work the papyrophobe cannot do"). Other signs of the syndrome include Cachinatory Inertia, "the habit of telling jokes instead of getting on with business," as well as Side-Issue Specialization, a commonplace substitute for competence characterized by the motto: "Look after the molehills and the mountains will look after themselves."

Staticmanship is the way to avoid the disastrous final promotion. It is a stratagem summed up by the classic injunction: "Cobbler, stick to your last." Peter himself, author of two serious books on disturbed children, thinks that one way he has avoided rising to final placement himself is by turning down lucrative consulting offers. This is known as Peter's Parry, and he admits that if most people employed it they would be nagged to distraction by their wives. A more practical technique is Creative Incompetence, or "creating the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence." Peter says that "for a clerical worker, leaving one's desk drawers open at the end of the working day will, in some hierarchies, have the desired effect." Other workers may have to shun the official coffee break or park in the boss's parking place occasionally. For women, "overly strong perfume works well in many cases." Should instant promotion threaten, more extreme action can be taken. Creating the impression of a sordid personal life is an excellent ploy. Arrange for a friend to telephone at the office, suggests Peter, and then within earshot of several co-workers cry out, "Don't tell my wife. If she finds out this will kill her." The hint of scandal ought to scotch any chance of promotion.

Peter ends his book with the hope that a philanthropist will soon endow a chair of hierarchiology at a major university. "I am ready for the post," he says, "having proven myself capable in my present endeavors."

Original here

What They Teach you at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism by Philip Delves Broughton

In 2004, the journalist Philip Delves Broughton walked away from what sounds like a peach of a job, Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph, to enrol in Harvard’s world-famous MBA (Masters in Business Administration) course. As a reporter he had managed to get himself blacklisted by the French foreign ministry for asking impertinent questions of the preening, poetry-writing Dominique de Villepin: surely a career high for any self-respecting hack. But he had serious doubts about his future in journalism, and indeed about newspapers themselves. “I wanted control over my time, my financial resources, and my life, and I imagined that a general competence in business would stand me in better stead.”

So off he went to Harvard Business School (HBS), where a coveted MBA represents the “union card of the global financial elite”. Harvard MBAs run the World Bank, the American Treasury, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble. Even George W Bush is an alumnus. To some indefinable extent, Harvard MBAs run your life: “The hours we work, the vacations we get, the culture we consume, the health care we receive.” And they are supremely confident they should.

The result of Delves Broughton’s time there is this funny and revealing insider’s view, revealing precisely because he is genuinely fascinated by the world of business, and his fascination is infectious. Yet feelings of unease emerge even before he arrives. He reads a student guide on What to Bring. “Don’t bring that guitar . . . Don’t bring any books from literature or history classes . . . Don’t bring your cynicism. Do bring all the diverse rest of you. We can’t wait to share the experience.” Immediately, his bolshie British bullshit- detector thrums into life: “Who were these people? And why did they talk like this? Why can’t I bring my cynicism? Or my books? Aren’t they a part of the ‘diverse rest of me’?” “Your calendar will be jam-packed with amazing, fun things to do,” warbles the guide.

Amazingly, despite this terrible threat, he persists. Instantly, he is swamped with work: company case studies, spreadsheet analysis, books called things such as Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, intended to make him feel he’s doing something terribly daring and manly. He is surprised at the large presence of earnest Mormons and unimaginative former-military men in this cauldron of capitalism. But gradually this begins to make sense, for HBS is pervaded with an oppressive atmosphere of unquestioning obedience and creepy religiosity. There is the confessional My Reflected Best-Self exercise, to encourage students “to create a developmental agenda for leveraging their reflected best-self” and “work maximally from positions of strength”. Approved results sound like this: “I do not take on the negative energy of the insecure . . . I stay centred . . . I try to model the message of integrity, growth and transformation.” Delves Broughton is quietly incredulous that people actually talk about themselves like this, in public, straight-faced.

The weirdest and creepiest episode is when a student writes to the entire school, confessing to a “regrettable property- damage incident”, a gorgeous euphemism for urinating against a neighbouring student’s door. “His behaviour had made him realise he still had work to do figuring out exactly who he was.” Ye-es . . . or maybe he should just resolve not to pee against people’s doors in future. Even more creepily, Delves Broughton finds that he no longer responds to such tosh with a healthy snort of laughter. “It was serious, right? Leadership. Core values. Transformation. Being true to oneself.” It takes his wife — his American wife — to inject some common sense. “These people are freaks.”

The total bill for his time at HBS is $175,000. Was it worth it? For all its vast reputation, power and pomposity, you feel that HBS neither understands the complexity nor acknowledges the chaotic unpredictability of the world economy any better than anyone else. More conclusively, it encourages its little alumni to major in hypocrisy. You go there for one simple reason: to make shedloads of money. Fine, so it’s no crime in itself to want to be absurdly and pointlessly rich, although it’s certainly no virtue. What sticks in the gullet is graduates’ self-flattering delusion that they’re on some kind of crusade, their “very American” insistence, as Delves Broughton puts it, on being not only “the most powerful, the richest and most successful”, but also “the most morally good”. At the same time as learning how to manipulate billions in order to profit, say, from ordinary people’s fretful indebtedness during a recession, you can believe that you are a philanthropic leader of men. Yet these are people whose answer to their own question, “How will I know how much is enough?” is, “When you've got your own jet.” Any notion that such jet-setting plutocrats are truly concerned about the rest of us, or the planet, or the future, is laughable.

Yet to support this sense of righteous mission there’s a whole new raft of jargon, not just daft but pretentious and nauseating. These money-loving graduates must nurture “heightened self-awareness” and “a strong moral compass”, they must “foster integrity strategies”, acquire “leadership and values”. But why the hell would the rest of us want to be led by these spreadsheet-reading, PowerPoint-presenting swots who’ve devoted the best years of their lives simply to making moolah?

The final, oddly moving moment of epiphany comes to Delves Broughton as he is wandering through a rainy Boston and pauses to read the plaques on the Old North Church. One is to “Paul Revere, 1735-1818. Patriot. Master Craftsman. Good Citizen. Born on Hanover Street. Lived on North Street. Established his bell foundry on Foster Street and died on Charter Street.” The brevity and quiet pride, the pioneer hardiness and unshowy self-sufficiency of Revere’s plaque seem in powerful contrast to the bloated and blustery style of the town’s world-famous business school, its restless, rootless, money-driven alumni now “disappearing to the ends of the earth in search of opportunity, worrying about work and life”. On reflection, “I felt better not being among them.”

More dash than cash

Philip Delves Broughton confesses that his first few months out of Harvard Business School were difficult. While fellow students stampeded down Wall Street snapping up jobs (‘some filed as many as 30 applications and found themselves with 30 interviews in one week’), he found himself falling back on his journalism while ‘waiting to become a titan of business’. Two years on, unnerved by classmates straining ‘so hard to secure jobs they knew would make them miserable’, Delves Broughton is finally putting his MBA skills to use. After flirting with an idea for a ‘very high end laundry firm’, he’s now setting up a cutting-edge podcast company with a friend. ‘It is a turbulent frontier world, and enormous fun to inhabit, whatever becomes of our venture,’ he says in a tone noticeably lacking in HBS get-up-and-go.

What They Teach you at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton

Viking £12.99 pp283 Buy the book at Books First £11.69 including free delivery

Original here