Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for November 08, 2015

A cable company has finally done some good by making Rat suffer.

Seriously, was Rat expecting anything different?

Maybe Rat should try calling Bombast at one or three o’clock in the morning.

Bombast rhymes with Comcast.

I have Bright House, and they will always leave you on hold no matter what time you call. How can so many people be having cable trouble at 3 AM???

Looks like everyone else had the same idea. Either that or Bombast is run by a bunch of lazy @$$h0!es.

Only the sort of cable company whose top exec would be picked for FCC chairman, would it not?

I read that fifth panel and heard it in a particular accent.

Does pig have whisker growth there? Barber, barber, jiggity jig, how many barbers to shave a pig? Well it’s 3:40AM here, what can I say?

Short answer, Rat: No.

I read this comic at 3am. (Okay, be fair. Eight minutes till.)

“Call volume” is the ratio of calls, both actual and projected, to the number of call takers.At 3:45 a.m., there is probably one call taker….

Really, Rat! I thought you were hipper than to expect a “friend” in Bombast Cable. How naive! Let this be a lesson to you. Streaming, baby; it’s the way to go!

IDK what’s funnier. Rat expecting to get an answer from a cable company @ 2 am or folks reading PBS @ 3am!

The Rat should pick up a baseball bat and go after the cablecompany!

So Rat can DISH it out, but he can’t take it Directly.

Was Rat expecting to find a friend, or his evil(er) twin?

Send Li’l Guard Duck to take care of ’em.

Rat, the reason for the high volume is from all the people still waiting in queue from when they call at 3 PM on the previous day

They purposely staff just short of the calls expected. I’m sure they know exactly how many to expect. I’m also sure they expect a certain number to drop off with time. I don’t know where Rat lives, but if he’s on the East Coast, plenty of people are awake at 11PM on the West.

this is all companies. if you call the proctologist, I bet you will get the same recording.

i agree. send in the guard duck! it’s what i deserve.

Pssst! Hey Rat….C’mere, pal…Yeah, over here…One word: “ROKU.”

They always make you wait.1. It makes you feel that they have much more important things to do, maybe your problem is not important.2. They can assault your ears with their very own commercial.3. They can reroute you to the website – which you can not access because the cable is down.

True, he is calling someplace on the other side of the world, a centralized call center handling calls for different company’s customers all over the English-speaking world. When you call as a Bombast customer, that company’s script comes on their screen and the rep follows it. They have no special knowledge to help you.

I used to work at an electronics company distribution center, and the break room was next to the sad, darkened former call center. Face it, no one wants to go to college to get a job where you get yelled at by irate customers.

I think that Comcast just puts that recording on no matter what. I do recommend going on the internet to gethuman.com where they tell you the easiest way to get to talk to someone at one of these giant corperations

They are placing you on hold because they are asleep, Rat.

You said it yourself “The WHOLE country is asleep”

xxx

Hello. I am Jibshit Khalimantanamayo but you can call me “Bubba.” We are very sorry but all of our customer support staff are making their daily blood sacrifice to Lord Shiva

Sorry Rat, but nobody wants to be your friend.

When you cheap out on customer service, you only hire one customer service operator for every 100 expected calls. Thus if there are two callers or more, they are experiencing high call volume, for the single operator on duty.

Same thing happened to me the other night with a taxi company

About a year ago my cable box went kablooie, it was working fine in the morning, then I spent the rest of the day watching Nitflix and switched back to cable when my favorite show was scheduled to come on and that’s when I discovered the power light was dark and nothing I did brought it back to life. I called Comcast and they did an online check of the system and agreed that the box was dead and agreed to send me a replacement and all I had to do was send the old one back when the new one arrived. They ended up sending me the wrong box, I was able to watch TV, but I couldn’t access the guide or on demand. I called to report the mistake and they promised to send me the right box right away. A week later I still didn’t have the new box so I called again and there was no record of the new box being sent out so they promised to send it out right away. A week later no box, so I called again and they said they’d send out a technician to see what the problem was. When the technician arrived his job sheet said that he was installing an extra box for another room, but he took one look at the problem and said, “You have the wrong box, I have a replacement out in me truck.” Five minutes later (after a six week wait) I finally had my full service back, but I still got charged for the service call.

No matter when you call a cable company, you will always be on hold for the next hour. And rat had to learn that the hard way….

Well, it was either that or, “Our offices are currently closed…”

It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Here I was hoping that it was they had Caller ID and remembered it was Rat.

Rat wants friends?