I’ve had some pretty terrible luck with large corporations lately. I’ve decided to log my irritating adventures:

Amazon
Recently I saw FarCry 2 at a good price at Amazon.com, $40. I thought I would buy it on something of a whim, so I place my order. I happen to look at the same item on Amazon the following day. The price has dropped to $25. Great, I think to myself, I’ll get a better price. I look at my orders and my order has not yet shipped, but can also not be canceled, which is ridiculous in and of itself. I decide, I’ll talk to customer service to refund the money. However, I won’t order another copy because logically I should be able to get the difference back on the one copy so why would I place an order that I know is going to be returned, costing shipping time and money for both myself and Amazon?

How naive I was. After several back and forth emails with Customer Service, they inform me Amazon has discontinued its price matching policy, and there is absolutely nothing they could do to help me. Despite the fact that the price had changed within 24 hours, and my order had not even shipped but could not be canceled, Amazon refused to match it’s own sale price.

This is unacceptable. I’ve returned the item, despite it being a reasonable starting price out of disgust, Amazon is charging me for the shipping which is unfortunate because I would have canceled my order if the system had let me. Their reaction has been disappointing to say the least.

I used to like to think of Amazon as one of the good guys.

Comcastic
Like so many other unfortunate people, Comcast is the cable company that I am forced to deal with. We get Comcast TV and Internet at our house, because we have no other choices (over the air, or satellite I suppose would be TV alternatives, but there are no such options for internet). Virtually every night our internet comes grinding to a halt, at times webpages won’t even load. One of my recent speed tests ( I should have taken a screen shot ), came in at a blister 214kbps.

The service we pay for is 6mbps, i.e. 6000kbps, or by my calculations: nearly 30 times faster than the actual service we get. We’ve been on the phone with their support and had a technician come to the house. The only answer we’ve received is that they’ve had a huge influx of customers and haven’t upgraded their bandwidth to support it yet.  This is ridiculous.

The worst part is that they flood our TV signal with commercials about how their cable faster is so much faster than the “Slowskys” DSL (a hard to find 1.5mbps DSL line that I’d bet runs cheaper than their service, but I digress). The funny part about this is that the service they rag on provides a CONSTANT (DSL is much more resistant to high traffic hours) 1.5mbps, or 5 times faster than the service we receive.

Moral of the story: Where is FIOS, and why hasn’t it wiped out the cable companies yet?