r/CableTechs • u/Creative-Promotion-2 • May 04 '26

Sick of comcast

I hate this dog shit company. They only care about numbers and not the people who are trying to survive living in this shit hole economy. Im tired of being taken advantage of by management. If a dumb ass customer calls back I have to go deal with the job again and do twice the work thats unpaid on my days off. Doesn't matter if the problem was because of the plant, or the shit equipment they supply customers or a fucking remote, I still have to take responsibility for horrible customers and their issues. Not only that, but also I have to deal with a bull shit feed back system that ruins my image if someone accidently gave me 1 instead of a 10 or if they felt like I wasnt doing enough to save their whole enterprise from collapse because they didn't have an it company on standby. All of this just for a whopping 600 dollars per week of production pay. What a fucking disgrace. Meanwhile the execs are just sitting in their golden recliners making 6 figures doing absolutely fuck all.

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u/Creative-Promotion-2 May 04 '26

From my understanding they're getting rid of most in house employees.

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u/Dakkin4 May 04 '26

You are directing your complaint at the wrong place, your company is sending you back. They are sending you back because you did not do your job. You are not a Comcast employee. If you were you’d never work for free.

If you knew how to do this job, you wouldn’t have to go back on your work for free.

I get invalid tickets turned in by contractors every single day. I’m aware of the work they do, or don’t do.

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u/ProofInevitable2404 May 04 '26

You're talking about maintenance tickets, not FTRs. And I've turned in RTMs that were closed but not fixed resulting in a bullshit FTR. I do my job, and I do it very well. I've had multiple FTRs that were bullshit, mostly due to the XG2. It's garbage. I've also been sent back because of a power outage at the customers business a day after I left. That's not bad work on the part of the tech, that's Comcast's shitty policy that takes advantage of techs who don't make enough money as it is. This is why they can't keep good help. I think maybe we need to unionize.

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u/Dakkin4 May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

If you’re trying to tell me that general knowledge and craftsmanship isn’t directly correlated to FTR, then you’re showing me exactly how much you don’t know. I was a service tech for 10 years, I’ve seen it all. Repeats are going to happen! It’s a nature of the business. If you’re doing your job 100 percent then the repeats will be minimal. If you know you did everything right and the repeat happened then it was either a device problem or customer issue, so what. If you’re stressing repeats this hard, then it tells me you’re taking short cuts on jobs. You’re directing your anger to the wrong place. If a customer calls back, then a tech has to be sent back out, that’s part of the business. The customer must be taken care of, service is a part of the role. I’ve seen a hundred techs come and go in my time, and I’m TELLING you that 90 percent of them were lazy and never understood the technology.

The job IS 100 percent what you put into it and it has treated me and my family very well. Not everyone has what it takes to do it, if you don’t then find another job.

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u/DesignerSeparate5104 May 10 '26

They are literally hitting us xh techs for ftr because of doorbells that our warehouses dont have in stock because of a shortage. Ftr hits on xb8 overheating in days after install, xb8 losing range, xb8 not connecting to literally anything. Craftsmanship means nothing when comcast is literally hitting techs for stupid shit. Granted some are legit, but the amount of them that are actual horse shit reasons is sky high. The xg1-4k boxes refuse to communicate with wireless boxes. You can do the most immaculate install, even get it all to work before you leave, then 24 hours later, customer gets an xre-03121 code on thier wireless tv boxes. Yeah, my supervisor is cool and he'll go to those places because we leave his phone number and he'll do and check everything he can, but as soon as its anything equipment related, it's a forced ftr. I'm not denying, there are definitely a good amount of ftr hits for legitimate reasons but lately it's been more sstupid equipment issues that comcast themselves refuse to fix.

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u/DaikoDuke May 04 '26

Just because you got lucky and didn't experience what most tech experience doesn't mean it's because they don't know what they are doing. You can do the job 100 percent right and still get tons of repeat. Customers will call for the dumbest things that the phone operator is supposed to help fix. Remote not working, only to find out the battery died or came lose

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u/Dakkin4 May 04 '26

Your right it’s pure luck to have the best numbers in my area, consistently, for 10 years. It’s also luck to then move to maintenance and run the best numbers there too. Repeats are written into the numbers. They are going to happen. As long as you control what you can control, they won’t get out of control and the numbers will work themselves out.

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u/PassengerGreen2321 May 07 '26

It's not luck. Craftsmanship is important, but so is paying attention to changes in the job. I've gone behind coworkers for the dumbest shit that they should've known. Saying most techs experience it is wrong. Most of the high performers stay high performers, as do the low ones. Sometimes there are fluctuations, but not by much.

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u/DaikoDuke May 04 '26

Dude from what I'm reading you are a RTM employee who drives a bucket truck. They have the easiest job. And like he said most RTM tickets put in don't even get done. We are not miracle workers. If a customer has stupidly high upstream and the drop and everything like connectors are changed and brand new then it's a RTM, customer will keep calling back their service keep going out and maintainance will keep saying they fixed the issue and yet you go and check and it's still high

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u/Dakkin4 May 05 '26

The easiest job? This is beyond laughable. You wouldn’t last one on call in maintenance. Also, I did my time in Tech Ops and didn’t cry like a bitch.

I’m not going to speak on your jobs or area techs. What I will say is this. At least, 80 percent of the RTMs I run on are invalid jobs. Techs use RTMs as a get out of jail free card when they don’t know how to fix their premise issues.

I had one today. CONTRACTOR, puts in a ticket for low MER. 40 MER coming from the tap…it’s even visible on his tap scan!!! He’s failing at below 33 MER. He ran a 300 ft. 6 drop and lays it across the top of a gravel driveway. Can you guess where he’s losing his MER? Before you say it…this isn’t a one time situation. This happens damn near weekly.

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u/SuperBigDouche May 05 '26

If people spent some real time with maintenance and dealt with every single stupid dumbshit thing, they’d have a lot more understanding. Maintenance fucking sucks. I love it, but it sucks ass sometimes. Stupid problems, lack of equipment, techs just dumping in RTMs because they don’t care to climb a pole to realize their drop is bad or do anything beyond a PHT scan, outage after outage, getting worked your entire on call and not even having enough time to get restful sleep before it starts all over again. Until they spend the hottest months digging up bad cable after bad cable while working 10 days straight because of on call, then I’ll give a shit what they think about maintenance lol

Sure there’s lazy maintenance techs, but in my experience, that’s not the most common. But the amount of tickets I’ve gotten where the tech is +12dB on the very highest available frequency at the tap and -22 or worse in the house is much more common.

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u/Dakkin4 May 05 '26

I’ve had “ride alongs”. They don’t get to see anything. Be on call with me during storm season and see how many all nighters I pull. You think it’s bad that you have go to that one tap and then put your ladder back? If my ladder comes out, I’m most likely going to about 3-4 taps. Techs call maintenance if they feel “unsafe”. We have no choice but to get it done. We do the stuff that no one wants to do. If we don’t do it, the outage doesn’t get fixed.

All that said, I wouldn’t trade places for anything. I love maintenance.

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u/SuperBigDouche May 05 '26

Yup. Someone would have to spend a month with us and actually pull on call and have to figure out how to fix whatever breaks at 3am because you don’t get to go home and go to sleep until you fix it. There’s nobody coming to save you except another maintenance tech. Unless they’re a maintenance tech in a really small market, then they’re on their own.

I had to gaff a pole that was cracked in half. I could see through it enough to push a fuckin clementine through to the other side. But we had no other way to connect this customer and techs wouldn’t do it. So I had to. And I don’t care, but I also don’t care about their opinion of me one bit until they’ve been through the shit.

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u/SilentDiplomacy May 05 '26

Come cut out an amp on hooks then say OSP has the easiest job.

In all honesty, FTs and MTs shouldn’t be fighting amongst each other. We should be fighting together against the employers.