Last year, I was about ready to drop Comcast after an extremely frustrating customer-service experience. They cut our service when disconnecting the deadbeat next door after his house went into foreclosure. We had no telephone, Internet or cable access for days.

I ultimately filed a complaint with the FCC and later fought with Comcast about billing for the interruption of service. I wasn’t about to pay for service I hadn’t received, and I was particularly irked that we had been denied emergency 911 access.

As bad luck would have it, I was in a car accident and wasn’t able to call my wife to let her know. The accident was only a couple of blocks from the house, so a good Samaritan agreed to drive to my house and tell her. Had the accident been worse, who knows how long it would have taken for someone to contact my wife and let her know what had happened.

Comcast ultimately agreed to refund the money for the days of the interrupted service; the company also upgraded us to a higher cable tier for six months for free. That would have been a fair deal, except for the fact that the signal to several of the channels in the upgraded tier never worked.

We endured multiple visits from different technicians over several months, including no shows and one early bird who decided it was OK to awaken my wife in the wee hours even though his appointment was supposed to be between 9 a.m. and noon. All of them kept saying another type of technician would have to visit.

Finally, a technician with enough commitment to stay more than 10 minutes found the problem: A squirrel had been chewing on some of the wires. He replaced the wires in question, and our free upgrade was restored entirely — just in time for it to be canceled.

That nightmare experience with Comcast came to mind today when I stumbled across this old video about a Comcast technician who fell asleep on a customer’s couch while waiting on his own company’s people to answer the phone. It’s a classic online video.