14 DAY TRIAL // A man from Northern California claims that his long-lasting dispute with Comcast has gotten him fired from his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC).
This may sound like a far-fetched claim, but the man has proof and he’s shown it all to ArsTechnica. Photos, notes, complaint letters, spreadsheets and more show the bumpy relationship between Conal O’Rourke and Comcast, a very valuable client to PWC.
O’Rourke is threatening to file a lawsuit if the company doesn’t agree to his demands, which includes a full retraction, his re-employment with his former employer and over $100,000 by next week.
The story starts in 2012, when O’Rourke moved to California. He has skills in accounting, financial analysis and auditing, which he used to later fight off Comcast. In February 2013, he moved to San Jose and signed up with Comcast, which was conveniently the only available service in his building.
After the first six weeks of service, he had yet to receive a bill. In April one finally arrived, sporting a lot of problems. His name was misspelled for starters, and then he was being charged for three “additional HD outlets” for an extra fee of $26.25 per month. On top of this, he was being charged for cable boxes that he claims to never have activated and that he was promised he wouldn’t have to pay for.
As part of the promotional deal, he was also supposed to have access to HBO and other premium channels for nine months, but they vanished after just three.
Multiple phone calls to Comcast later, he walked into a store where the assistant store manager promised everything would get fixed. From there on out, everything took a bad turn.
Since he was caught with work, O’Rourke couldn’t address the issues with Comcast, but by October 2013, his Internet speeds had dropped until he could barely do anything online.
“I had contacted them regarding lack of responsiveness and performance issues; sometimes my service wouldn’t be usable and I had to hotspot in with AT&T,” he told ArsTechnica. He was promised technical support, but the Comcast people never showed up.
A new turn of events
After traveling overseas for the next couple of months, he came back to find several boxes containing equipment from Comcast that he never ordered and a bill for over $2,000. He took the packages to the same Comcast store and got a service ticket number 395, while the store was only on ticket 251. O’Rourke decided to leave and come back closer to 7PM when they closed, thinking that someone would be in a hurry to resolve his issue and go home.
True enough, the equipment got returned and the charges were cleared, while O’Rourke also sent over a spreadsheet containing a detailed look at the extra charges that he’d noticed over the months. After an email saying that the spread sheet hadn’t gotten through, he never heard from that clerk again.
The billing errors persisted and Comcast eventually sent a collections agency after O’Rourke, saying that his account was two months past due.
Eventually, he contacted Lawrence Salva, the Comcast controller who oversees the accounting division of the company. While he couldn’t discuss with Salva, he got phoned by another Comcast employee who didn’t even know what the issue was about. O’Rourke got angry and said that he’d go to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
The domino effect
“Instead of retuning Mr. O’Rourke’s money to him and correcting the billing error, Comcast employees gleaned from Mr. O’Rourke’s reference to the PCOAB that he was an accounting professional, researched him online and falsely stated to Mr. O’Rourke’s employer Pricewaterhouse Coopers that Mr. O’Rourke had attempted to use his position with PWC as ‘leverage’ with Comcast when ‘negotiating’ over his bill,” reads a letter from the man’s lawyer.
The result was the fact that O’Rourke was the subject of an internal PWC ethics investigation in early February and was terminated on the 18.
He now wants his money and his job back, as well as to clear his name after being “shocked, humiliated and ashamed” due to the unjustified loss of his job.
While the job loss part is new, the complaints regarding the way Comcast does business aren’t. In fact, just a few months back, several extremely long phone calls went viral as a man was trying to cancel his subscription.