Comcast Half-Apologizes to the Customer It Allegedly Got Fired
Comcast has issued an apology to former customer Conal O'Rourke, who claims he was fired from his position at PricewaterhouseCoopers after calling Comcast's controller to complain about repeated overcharges on his bill.
In a post titled "A Public Apology to Conal O'Rourke," Comcast's Charlie Herrin—who was recently put in charge of repairing the company's reputation for atrocious customer service—claims no one at Comcast explicitly asked PWC to fire O'Rourke.
Herrin says the company will start an investigation to get to the bottom of O'Rourke's service issues, and admits Comcast "dropped the ball," but doesn't say anything more about O'Rourke's loss of his job.
Even if he had never been fired, the service issues and billing problems O'Rourke described would rank his among the worst Comcast horror stories we've seen. He says his bill was never correct during the year he was a customer, and attempts to fix it resulted in Comcast shipping him nearly $2,000 of equipment he didn't need, then trying to bill him for it.
When O'Rourke, an accountant with 20 years of experience in corporate comptrollership, brought in a detailed spreadsheet showing every time the company had billed him incorrectly, they promised the errors would be corrected—and then sent him to collections.
That's when O'Rourke escalated his complaint to the office of Comcast's Chief Accounting Officer—resulting, O'Rourke says, in his firing from PWC, which counts Comcast as a major client.
O'Rourke told Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar he was considering suing if Comcast didn't offer "a full retraction and apology, his re-employment with his former employer, and $100,312.50" by October 14.
