Submitted via an email form to Comcast this morning:
This morning I ran the Comcast install CD wizard on my macintosh. It’s running OS 10.3. When the wizard was finished, the internet connectivity was working great, but for some reason, it changed my shell prompt. Previously, it was displaying Hosaka:> – which is the name of my computer. Now it displays c-24-19-225-21:> – which is the letter C followed by the dynamic IP address that was just assigned to my computer.
I use my shell prompt all day long for internet work, so while this is a cosmetic change, it is important to me. I could not find how to change it back, so I called 800-Comcast for tech support.
When I called at about 11am on Monday, November 1st, I was connected to John, who gave his service ID as 62410.
John was EXTREMELY unhelpful. After describing the problem to him, his first reaction was “That is clearly not an IP address”. After I explained that nothing else had changed on the computer, and that the wizard had clearly made this change, he told me that there was no way the wizard did this, since all it does is configure the IP (not true, by the way, the mac wizard does several other things, including creating a new location profile). When I persisted, John informed me that they don’t support OS 10.3, and that I should contact Apple tech support instead.
When I asked John to transfer me to a manger or someone else, he refused, and informed me that the managers were only there for payroll, and deferred all tech discussion to the “training and experience” of the guys on the floor, like him.
When I asked him to transfer me to someone where I could lodge a complaint, he told me I could find the information on the website. I asked him if he could just transfer me, since I had already called the number on the website, and he got sarcastic and asked “Are you talking over a website right now?”
I’m disappointed both in complete unwillingness of the phone support guy to try to find a solution, and in the fact that the wizard made this kind of change without giving me a way to set it back.
Edit: About twelve hours later now, and I’ve just added my wi-fi router to the mix, which assigned a new IP address to my computer, which seems to have fixed the problem, meaning it was a temporary thing. Thank goodness, since I was not looking forward to calling “tech support” again. Long story short: everything seems to be working now, no thanks to Comcast.