Saturday, May 26, 2012

Comcast

5/26/2012
Mr. Neil Smit, President
Comcast Cable
1500 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102

Dear Mr. Smit,

It has recently come to my attention that my Comcast Cable and Internet has changed from $85.55 to $93.49 a month.  Mind you, I was not on any sort of deal where the service was cheaper for a certain number of months.  This was just a straight jack-up in price.
Now, I’m sure I accidentally tossed out some nondescript jargon-laced paperwork that explained what necessitated this change, and I’m not even going to spend any time arguing with your customer service reps about whether or not I received it.  I just want to let you know, I seriously feel I am continually getting less and less for my money with Comcast, and more and more I’m seeing it as something that I just flat out cannot afford to be wasting my money on.  In fact, I had already called to have my features downgraded because I couldn’t afford the previous price.  I was glad to see it down in the 80s range for a while, but here it is going up again, unexpectedly.
I am not a huge TV watcher and I no longer need the Internet for work, so what are my options at this point?  Should I cancel one and hang onto the other for a while until the price of one service alone gets jacked into the $90 range?  Which one of the two is cheaper?  I’m thinking TV will just have to go, unless there are any further downgrades I can ask for.  And at that point, is it even worth having?
Let’s be honest, with all this DVD and Blu-Ray and FIOS and all this other crap, the value of what I’m getting in a standard cable package is actually decreasing, and yet I am continually paying more and more for it.  It’s price I simply can’t afford.  I hope you can work with me on this somehow, but please do not contact me via telephone.  My account number is ###################.

Sincerely,

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Gary Johnson

5/12/2012
Mr. Gary Johnson
731 E South Temple
Salt Lake City, Utah  84102
Dear Mr. Johnson,
Having watched your responses in one of the Republican debates you weren’t shafted out of, I’d have to say I describe myself as casually supportive but optimistic about your bid as Libertarian candidate for the presidency in 2012.  I have been a Ron Paul fan for some time, and being that the Pennsylvania primary is now history, becoming a full-fledged Johnson supporter seems like a logical next step.
Though I have my familiarity with your campaign is not extensive, I do, however, have a few concerns that I feel obligated to convey to you in the furtherance of your bid for the White House.  First of all, with all due respect to the hard-working staff who came up with these, shirts with slogans like “The Coolest President in History” and “The People’s President” strike me as closer to something out of Weekend at Bernie’s than a legitimate political campaign.  I honestly wanted to buy a Johnson shirt and spread the message but was stymied in this regard by the fact that your campaign merchandise seems less than serious.  I did find a nice Johnson shirt on another website, but the proceeds don’t go to the campaign so it felt like it didn’t make any sense to buy it.  I do want to note that the slogan “Live Free,” even though it immediately brings to mind the words “or Die Hard,” isn’t as bad as the others.

Furthermore, the correlation of your name and the word “marijuana” on your website and on Google, Ebay, et cetera, comes off as a cheap ploy to fool stoner college kids into one-issue voting for Johnson.  I realize that your stance on this subject is more substantive than this, but the casual observer will not, and again it makes your campaign come off as less serious than it ought to.

Again, I am not writing this out of animosity, but rather out of concern for how your campaign is being imaged.  I consider myself a Johnson supporter in the 2012 election, and I both hope and expect to see you finishing strong in November.

Sincerely,