Archive for November 2nd, 2007
Tap of the iceberg: Comcast and the hammer lady
November 2, 2007A friend of mine called my attention yesterday to the incredible story of Comcast and “the hammer lady,” Mona Shaw, 75, folk hero.
I won’t repeat the story of how she and her husband were misused by this huge corporation, or how she took matters into her own hands by smashing some Comcast equipment at their Manassas, Virginia, office. You probably know it already and if you don’t, you can type her name into a search engine and get, as I did, a page full of reports mostly about her action plus 350,000 other sites to check.
A highly successful consultant to business leaders, my friend Kathy wrote, “As someone who is a creator of ‘Marketing Messages’…. it is my worst nightmare that customers would begin to utter a catch phrase I’ve developed for a client as a profanity.”
But now something like that is happening. Just as “going postal” was born and then added to our language, the term “being comcastic” has been coined and launched. One day soon, dictionaries may list this entry: Comcastic – “adj., behaving with insensitivity to and disregard for the interests of customers.”
Mona Shaw, as my friend Joe in Houston tells me, is much revered by several members of his Unitarian Universalist Church who have had unfortunate dealings Read the rest of this entry »