Phillies radio silliness

There's a commercial which airs on Phillies radio broadcasts. Since I dislike Comcast, but am addicted to the Internet, I'm willing to pay them for high-speed Internet access but not for cable TV. This means I listen to Phillies games on the radio.

Anyway, there's a commercial for Citizens Bank (who own the naming rights to Citizens Bank Park, where the Phillies play) that regularly airs during these broadcasts. It goes something like this (I'm paraphrasing, but the "math" is correct):

Did you ever notice how important the number seven is to the Phillies? They've won seven National League East division titles. There are seven letters in Ashburn, Schmidt, and Carlton. Thirty-two Hall of Famers played for the Phillies. Divide by the number of runs scored in a grand slam and, yes, you get eight. Subtract the number on Whitey's back and what do you get. Seven!

The voice then proceeds to tell us how Citizens Bank is open seven days a week. Which I suppose would be nice to know if I didn't do basically all my banking at ATMs anyway.

But I think the commercial is intended to make fun of people who jump through hoops like this to make the numbers work out. And seven is a small number and therefore easy to manufacture by the manipulation of other small numbers, or so I noted on July 7, 2007.

Comcast and dishonesty, part 1

I live in Philadelphia, home of Comcast. I can see Comcast's new tower in downtown Philly -- when completed, it'll be the "tallest buildling between New York and Chicago" -- from my living room window. An exercise for the reader: where do I get my Internet access from?

If you guessed Comcast, you're right.

Now, I recently had a bizarre customer service with them. The story goes as follows:

Saturday, noon. I'm sitting in my apartment. The Internet and the cable TV stop working, at essentially the same time. I call tech support, wait on hold, and so on. Now, whenever I talk to someone at Comcast's cable television division, they insist "oh, that's an Internet problem, that's not our problem." Hello? They come over the same wire. They go out at the same time. You expect me to believe this is two independent problems/ In the two years I've lived in the territory of Comcast or its predecessors, twice I've lost cable TV and Internet at the same time. I've never lost one but not the other.

Let's say there are three kinds of problems that can happen - one that makes just the TV go out, one that makes just the Internet go out, and one that makes both go out simultaneously. These are all "rare events" -- let's say each happens once a year -- and furthermore I'll say they're Poisson processes. (This basically means that future outages are not aware of past outages, which is technically called "memorylessness" or "independent increments". Now, let's say my cable and my Internet both went out within the last five minutes. What's the probability the same problem caused both?

The probability of losing my cable and Internet due to the same problem in any five-minute interval is five divided by the number of minutes in a year. Since I like RENT (the musical), I know that a year is 525,600 minutes, so this probability is one in 105,120; call it one in 100,000, since everything here is obscenely approximate anyway. But the probability that I lost them due to separate problems? It's the square of this, one in ten billion. So if I lived in this apartment for a hundred thousand years -- ten billion five-minute perioods -- then one hundred thousand times I will lose both TV and Internet due to the same problem. And one time, they'll just happen to go out within five minutes of each other, independently.

Conclusion? Even though I'm complaining about the Internet, it's your job to fix it. But you say "tell your landlord", because of course it's not your company's fault.

Saturday, 1pm. I call my landlord (a small, local property management company; their offices are closer than the closest mailbox, so I walk the rent over there instead of sticking it in the mail when it's due once a month.) The landlord says "it's not my problem", which is what I expected. then I get the tip which will haunt me for the next many days -- "I just let someone from Comcast into the basement of your building."

I run downstairs, chase down a guy in a Comcast pickup truck I see across the street. Someone -- him? one of his colleagues? I'm not sure -- had been there disconnecting people's cable because they weren't paying. I was paid up, but they'd made a mistake. The probabilistic moral here? This will happen less often if you live in a small building. (I've heard this about theft, as well -- the smaller the number of people who have keys to your building, the less likely your property is to be stolen.)

Another moral here is that Comcast ought to have a better system for telling which wire services which apartment, but that'll come later, when I talk about how their current system seems to work.

Comcast's "Service Protection Plan".

I got my cable bill today.

Enclosed with my cable bill was an ad for Comcast's "Service Protection Plan". Comcast's policy is apparently to charge for "wire-related service calls". The ad says the following:

"For a low monthly fee of $3.30, you'll be covered for all inside wire-related service calls. Without the plan, regular service call charges will apply. Current service call charges are $22.25 for a video-only service call and $32.25 for a High-Speed Internet or Digital Voice service call."

So this is only a good buy if I expect to have a service call every 22.25/3.30 = 6.74 months (if I'm a video-only customer) or 32.25/3.30 = 9.77 months (if I only have Internet and/or digital voice through them and don't have their television service, which I suspect is quite rare); for those people who might incur both kinds of charges, the relevant quantity is somewhere in between.

In any case, nobody's wiring is that bad, is it, that it needs fixing more than once a year? And if it is, don't you have bigger things to worry about than your cable TV? Comcast is probably making huge piles of money off of this.

You might say that the reason for a customer to buy this is for "insurance", and that my expected value calculation is sort of silly because you're not protecting against the average but against the unusual. And that would be a valid point if, say, they were offering "for a low monthly fee of $330, you'll be covered for charges which are usually $2225 or $3225". These numbers are in the right ballpark for, say, car insurance. But I would hope that people have the good sense to save enough money that an unexpected expense of $22.25 isn't going to hurt them.

(The fine print says that this isn't available to "customers in a residential building with multiple apartments", which describes me.)