Comcast could have killed my husband tonight. I'm furious.

[DebJ]

44. My point is we did not know of this planned, scheduled outage of service.

Not a breakdown 'outage', but a planned, scheduled, regularly occuring downtime in phone service
of which we would not ever receive notification.

I could not decide to NOT get Comcast phone service because of this issue, because I was not
made aware that this was their policy. I still would not know except that I happened to be up
in the wee hours and online.

As I said, this never has been the case in my decades of phone service with Verizon; why would
I presume Comcast would do this?
My biggest gripe is that Comcast does not make customers clearly aware that this is how they operate,
so it is denying them opportunity to insure they have back up or to not sign up with them in the first place.
I find this deceptive and dangerous. And yes, THIS IS COMCAST'S CHOICE AND I WASN'T GIVEN INFO
TO REALIZE THAT. THEY ARE TO BLAME.

We are now locked into this service until our contract expires in the near future.

And by the way, we bought our equipment 3 years ago when my husband received a small inheritance
when his mother passed away. At the time, our one TV was 12 years old and malfunctioning. We used that cash
to replace the dying tv. We are NOT tech freaks who upgrade things in our life just to upgrade, nor fill
every room with gadgets. We have one tv. We only bought in 2009 because otherwise we would soon
have had no functioning tv. We have so little technology or anything of material value that when burglars
struck our home two years ago, all they took was a piggy bank with some old coins in it. We have one
computer that we also purchased with the inheritance. That's it. We won't buy again until forced to do so,
hopefully not for another decade.

So please don't perceive us as people who choose to go into debt to keep up the pace and have lots of toys.
We aren't that type. When forced to replace a tv or computer, every 12 years or so, we buy the best technology
we can afford to do, with cash, so that we can extend the time longer when newer technologies might force
us to upgrade. It was pragmatism, not being excessive.

We are both teachers and did not know that right after we bought the TV, furloughs would begin and
just keep increasing over the next two years, making my prospects for employment nil, while still
owing college costs.
2009, we bought the tv. 2010, furloughs began.
2011, another 1 in 4 teaching jobs cut (at which point we went with triple-play just to save
$40 a month, along with other cuts we made). And now, my husband has been told he may have 4 or
5 paychecks and then the school can't pay him or any teachers at all. But he will still 'have a job'
and therefore not be entitled to unemployment, isn't that a sweet deal?

No doubt we wil 'give up' the DVR when the contract expires; just hoping that isn't part of losing the roof over our heads as well.