I am Karen

Last week one of my healthcare providers and I were chatting about the challenge of explaining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to people, particularly when you don’t seem like a typical victim. 

 

PTSD can happen to anyone. Trauma tangles the neural wiring that connects a wide variety of brain functions, including memory, fear, rage, reason, and motor control. Two people can endure the same traumatic event or experience, but only one might develop PTSD. Days or years later, you might encounter a particular feeling, person, or experience that flips the switches in your brain and triggers a cascading response from your body.

 

One of my friends in Bellingham developed PTSD after serving as an Army Ranger medic in Afghanistan. I told him I feel sheepish sharing the same DSM-5 category as him. He told me not to worry, and that soldiers feel lucky they get so many folks’ respect. They’re more concerned about the many children and women who are scarred by the impact of domestic abuse and do not have access to the help they need. 

In November 2015, my Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic sent me to a specialized PTSD therapist. She helped me identify how my symptoms were rooted in traumatic events I experienced thirty years earlier as an overachieving gay student at Brigham Young University and as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea. 

 

In my recent blog essays “Move On” and “Blink,” I described the Mormon church’s relentless campaign against LGBT dignity and inclusion. Throughout my lifetime, Mormon leaders have insisted on embracing junk science, such as pray-the-gay-away “reparative therapy.” Perhaps most insidiously, the Brethren deny our very existence – refusing to use words like “gay,” “lesbian,” or “transgender,” and instead insisting we’re merely weak sinners who struggle with what they refer to as “same-sex attraction problems.” When you also consider my family’s wrenching move from Vancouver to Utah when I was an adolescent, plus my coming out as a gay man at the height of the AIDS pandemic, it’s no wonder I ended up with PTSD.

 

Because of the nature of my underlying traumas, my most serious individualized PTSD symptoms are triggered when I feel a sense of powerlessness, repression, being silenced, or rendered invisible once again. As result, my disability makes me particularly vulnerable to gaslighting lawyer tactics. 

Looking back at my writing about mental illness over the last four years, I realize I’ve focused primarily on the physical symptoms, such as trichotillomania, insomnia, and bruxism, that emerged after my abusive former employers triggered my body’s response to ancient traumas. Because of Defendants’ and their co-conspirators’ subsequent misconduct and their continued stonewalling delays, I remain trapped in a vicious cycle of stressful triggers, re-traumas, and re-triggers. I’ve written about the resulting plagues of boils, MRSA, auto-immune dysfunction, depression, anxiety, but not frogs yet.

 

I’ve also referred several times to triggers leading to “PTSD episodes,” but I haven’t yet described the mechanics of the experience. In some ways it’s like the arrival of a migraine – you realize it’s happening, but there’s nothing you can to do to stop the buzzing and pressure on your brain. Soon it becomes impossible to think and communicate clearly. 

When I began reporting about life with mental illness, my examples of PTSD episodes all involved wretched customer service. I had a short fuse, and I ran into a lot of bad service. Eventually I learned to modulate my reaction to frustrating encounters. Now I react excessively only to terrible service with a reality-denying totalitarian bent, not your day-to-day consumer abuse. For example, just last week I made an embarrassing scene in a bank lobby. Not my fault.

 

When my disability was still new, I was constantly surprised by the wide variety of triggering events that somehow resonated with my thirty-year old traumas. Things have mellowed since then. My biggest PTSD epiphany this year came when I was playing a family board game at my parents’ house, and I became so frustrated I had to go into the other room and give myself a timeout. (It turns out there are trauma-based reasons I haven’t been able to play chess since I was a child, much to my son’s disappointment.)

 

Despite the progress I’ve made with my disability, I continue to endure another very predictable trigger:  gaslighting lawyers. In May 2017, I filed a lawsuit in state court against the attorney-investigator firm my former employers hired to cover up my wrongful termination. Attorney General Bob Ferguson assigned two lawyers from the Attorney General’s Tort Division, Assistant Attorney General Suzanne LiaBraaten and Assistant Attorney General Janay Ferguson, to represent the State’s interest in the investigator lawsuit. Ferguson and LiaBraaten obstructed discovery, made frivolous privilege assertions, and abused the legal process. In 2019, Ferguson and LiaBraaten violated the Ethics in Public Service Act and the Rules of Professional Responsibility when they made false representations in their co-workers’ lawyer discipline proceeding. Ferguson herself is the subject of a pending ethics complaint, and is a named defendant in my federal lawsuit against the State and its representatives. 

 

Nevertheless, Attorney General Ferguson insisted on assigning Defendant Ferguson as lead counsel on behalf of the other defendants in the federal lawsuit. Her conduct of the litigation has been an outrage. Here’s what I said in a sworn declaration about how it feels when dishonest government lawyers trigger a PTSD episode:

 

Responding to the first motion Defendant Ferguson filed in my federal court case one year ago was one of my most harrowing experiences in years. For every ten minutes I spent working on the brief, I had to spend at least an hour on soothing activities like talking with my children, walking the dogs, meditating, exercising, etc. Now that my kids are back from visiting my ex during the summer, the presence of other observers in the house makes my AGO- triggered PTSD symptoms even more noticeable. Over and over as I was forced to confront the State’s lies, I would read or write a single sentence. Then I would compulsively leap out of my chair and pace ten or twenty laps around the house, grinding my teeth from bruxism and rubbing my scalp raw from trichotillomania. When my teenaged daughter who wants to go to medical school heard my involuntary wheezes and groans, she thought I was having a heart attack. 

 

Every one of Defendant Ferguson’s court filings and each of her communications to me over the past year was triggering. (Fortunately, her good cop co-counsel politely handled all the administrative stuff.) For example, on multiple occasions she took the position on behalf of the State of Washington that for the last six years I’ve been faking a disability to cover up for my professional incompetence and my sexism.

 

I asked the State’s lawyers to accommodate my disability by assigning a lawyer other than Defendant Ferguson to communicate with me. They refused. Eventually I asked the judge to order this reasonable disability accommodation. On September 15, 2021, Judge Jones granted my request. I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders.

Defendant Ferguson’s counterpart in my state court lawsuit against the private investigator firm is Claire Martirosian, a junior partner at the grinding insurance defense firm whose apparent goal is to provoke me into pulling out the last hair on my forehead.

 

Ms. Martirosian has been involved in the case ever since the summer of 2017 when the investigators fired their first, even less smart insurance defense firm. In contrast with the division of labor between the boy-girl legal team in my federal lawsuit against the State, Ms. Martirosian is handling everything solo. That means she plays both the good cop and bad cop roles. In “Secret Agent,” I wrote about how Ms. Martirosian triggered a PTSD episode in the middle of oral argument in the Court of Appeals two years ago when she blatantly lied in response to the key question from the bench.

 

Last Friday two letters from Ms. Martirosian arrived back-to-back in my inbox. The good cop first letter responded to the proposed deposition schedule I had circulated earlier in week. Of course Defendants didn’t agreed to the schedule, or propose an alternative. But the letter wasn’t triggering, merely another round of familiar litigation Kabuki.

 

In contrast, Ms. Martirosian’s bad cop second letter was a tissue of lies. She blatantly mischaracterized the Washington Supreme Court’s recent ruling, and triggered another PTSD episode.  Once again I alarmed the dogs by leaping out of my desk chair and pacing around the house. I lost count after 87 laps. 

If I were a Republican congressman, I could announce “As the father of two daughters, I condemn the Attorney General’s scurrilous accusations of sexism.” But I believe in mindfulness and empathy. When someone else’s model of reality diverges so far from my model (and from reality), I wonder why.

Here is Defendant Ferguson most recent accusation that I am an unrepentant misogynist:

Mr. Leishman elected not to respond to the Defendants’ requests for conferral because it was not made by the male attorney with whom he prefers to communicate…. Defendants will not recount the many, documented instances of Mr. Leishman’s personal attacks on Ms. Ferguson and other women, parties and not, attorneys and not, because that issue is beyond the scope of this motion. When they do, Defendants will submit evidence, not conclusory allegations, proving that Mr. Leishman disproportionately demeans, attacks, and underestimates women – particularly those who disagree with his subjective view of events. Avoidance of female counsel is not a reasonable accommodation.

Washington tax dollars paid for this deranged rant, which appears on page two of the State Defendants’ Reply in support of their Second Motion to Stay Discovery. 

My eyes were drawn to the word “disproportionately.” Perhaps Defendant Ferguson is referring to the fact that woman outnumber men in the captions of my lawsuits. That’s because most of the middle and lower level managers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office and other State agencies are women – but all the top brass are men. The federal defendants include the office of Governor Jay Inslee; the office of Attorney General Bob Ferguson; Bob’s two top lieutenants, the Chief Deputy Attorney General (Defendant Shane Esquibel) and the Solicitor General (Defendant Noah Purcell); and the former president of Western Washington University (Defendant Bruce Shepard). These important gentlemen are joined by seven female underlings who personally interacted with me or were directly involved in misconduct and coverups. Only one defendant is actually named “Karen.” I could have sued two more female defendants, my unprepared novice “Team Leader” and her passive-aggressive supervisor. But I don’t need to make everything personal.

Behind every powerful man is a harem of less powerful women. Look at Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or Andrew Cuomo and Melissa DeRosa. One definition of a “Karen” is someone who is not quite privileged enough to avoid doing the dirty work herself, and takes it out on the unprivileged. Or maybe a Karen is just someone who likes dirty work.

Although Bellingham is blessed with amazing public schools, shepherding three teenagers through Zoom School was a challenge for everyone. At the height of the pandemic I had to deal with one of those bureaucratic tangles that would have been triggering even at the best of times. 

I’ve always been terrible at talking on the telephone with strangers, and PTSD just makes things worse. This phone conversation with an assistant principal was excruciating, a combination of Abbott & Costello & Kafka. The school administration had ignored my communications for weeks, and instead kept asking me to do administrative tasks that made no sense. I tried desperately to remain calm. It was a blunt yet incoherent calm, as I kept flirting with entitled-lawyer global nuclear destruction mode. The bees were buzzing in my head. Late in the phone call we figured out the reason no one had paid attention to my messages was that the school’s spam filter had tweaked itself to eliminate me. Nothing I said was getting through. 

The assistant principal took a deep breath, I sorta de-escalated, and we shared an awkward chuckle. When I finally ended the telephone call, I looked around and realized my son Oliver had been listening. His observation:

“Papa, you sound like a Karen.”

Yep.

Better-ish

As a Gay Sitcom Dad, I’m always in search of typecasting ideas. 

For example, a couple of years ago I wrote in “Tragedy Tomorrow” that most days I saw myself in striped pajamas as the Movie Dad from Life is Beautiful, shielding his son from the horror of the Holocaust. Only “once or twice a year” did I manage to achieve the ultimate parental glow:  on a particularly good day, I’d end a conversation with one of my children “feeling like Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In the last few months I’ve experienced another exponential improvement in my mental health. The timing is particularly fortunate – with the exception of five days’ respite over Winter Break, I've been a full-time single dad ever since my ex moved back to the Midwest in August.

Nowadays I can pull off ultra-sensitive single dad/lawyer Atticus Finch mode whenever I sit down for a soulful conversation with one of my children. But I like to mix things up. Some days I lean more toward Oscar Wilde – the world needs more Witty Gay Sitcom Dad. However, my fallback role is Jeeves. It’s best for everyone if my kids think of me as omniscient and omnicompetent.

Last Wednesday, Jeeves failed me completely. I was discussing the Olympics with my eleven-year-old son. He didn’t believe me when I insisted the Tokyo games will be held a couple of years from now, four years after the last Summer Olympics.

Later that day I had a similar conversation with one of the Baritones from Vancouver Men’s Chorus. We were trying to figure out when we sang “Love Shack” by the B-52s. By my mental calculation it was a couple of June concerts ago. Not four.

I was absolutely convinced it’s been two years since VMC’s “Road Trip” show and the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Fortunately Jeeves and I didn’t bet anyone a new X-Box.

This strange two-year gap in my internal chronology shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Here’s what I wrote a couple of years ago in “Woke”:

I am currently living in my own Hallmark Christmas movie.

Last Christmas is a blur. I retained only a couple of memories from last year’s VMC concert. Mostly I hid in dark corners. Indeed, most of 2015 - 2017 is lost in a fog. After increasing frustration with practicing law and raising kids in Seattle, I grasped at the false hope of moving to Bellingham for my dream job. Instead, a tragic confluence of bad choices, bad luck, and bad people destroyed my life. 

This Christmas is different. I can tell I've turned an important corner in the last few months. My mental health is noticeably better – not just the wearying projection of normalcy, but my actual mental health. I get out of bed and do stuff. The kids are thriving in Bellingham. I voraciously read and write again after years of drought. Things make sense for the first time in decades. Although I miss my faraway friends from earlier epochs, I’m putting down roots and making friends again. Not only did I enjoy singing in VMC’s holiday concerts, but I finally overcame my anxiety over socializing with all those nice Canadians just across the border. (They’re mostly harmless.) I even managed to sing a fleeting faux-Jewish solo without melting down.

It’s like I woke up out of a coma just in time for Christmas Eve. A holiday miracle. 

This is the point in the Hallmark Channel movie where everyone hugs and cries. Then I ask, “So what did I miss?”

What feels different this time is the rest of the fog has lifted. The scariest part of living with mental illness is when you know you’re not yourself. Anhedonia smothers you like a blanket, and loved ones describe strangely uncharacteristic behaviors you don't remember.  

Now I feel like myself, even when I feel unwell. The good news is that most of my fuzzy memories have finally snapped into place. The bad news is that my brain concluded the simplest way to adjust my internal clock was to delete two years from the timeline. It’s sorta like switching to Daylight Savings Time. Or like when England converted from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, and eleven days were dropped from September 1752.

So how am I doing with some of the other challenges I’ve described on this blog? For one thing, telephone customer service representatives across North America and the Indian subcontinent can rejoice. They don’t push my buttons anymore.

As longtime readers will recognize, this change is a big deal. Numerous early blog essays were devoted to my horrifying experiences dealing with Comcast’s wretched customer service. In contrast, for the last month I’ve been struggling to get my mother’s iPhone connected to the rest of us as part of Apple’s byzantine “Family Sharing” program. So far I’ve had five long telephone conversations with Apple technical support, as well as exchanging numerous emails. 

As my parents can attest, I’ve calmly handled the entire Kafka-esque experience. At one point, someone from Apple sent me an email suggesting that I log out of my own AppleID, and log back in. The next time I spoke with a technician on the telephone, she gasped and said “ooh, that was a bad idea.”

According to Apple, my mother will only have to wait another two weeks to access the family music account. At least she can now check Facebook and Fitbit again. Meanwhile I still can’t get my laptop, iPhone, and computer to synch. But somehow life goes on.

There’s been much less progress with some of my other PTSD-amplified anxiety symptoms. For example, I still struggle with serious bruxism, i.e. teeth-grinding.  

A few months ago, the pain in my jaw was excruciating. For the first time in my life, I scheduled a nonregular dentist appointment. I was convinced that I needed a replacement filling or a root canal. Fortunately, the X-ray didn’t reveal any serious problems. Unfortunately, my teeth grinding is out of control once again. Meanwhile, our dog Buster chewed up my night guard along with several more pairs of socks and underwear. 

So for Christmas my parents got me socks and a new night guard.

My daughters were born two weeks apart. Rosalind was adopted three and half year after Eleanor’s birth, and the girls have zero in common biologically, physically, or otherwise. We have an unusual hashtag in our family:  #NotTwins. For example:

Last month, one of my daughters sat me down and said “Papa, you realize you’re supposed to look people in the eyes when you talk to them, don’t you?”

Later that same week, my other daughter hugged me and said “Papa, I’m glad you don’t stammer when you’re home with us.”

I use the catchall phrase “social anxiety” to refer to various overdetermined layers of tics and behaviors. Some of mine relate to codependency, which my insightful Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic identified four years ago when he diagnosed me with PTSD. Fortunately, I’ve successfully faced codependency after years of Codependents Anonymous and other treatment steps. Even the most relentless narcissists from my prior life finally realize I’m not going to return their texts and give them one more chance.

Other social challenges result from the tyranny of the closet and the lingering effects of trauma. As I wrote in “Avoidant,” most theories of human psychology, from Freudian analysis to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, place great weight on what we avoid. Avoidant thoughts and behaviors indirectly reveal how our mind works, or doesn’t work. As I gradually sift through layers of painfully repressed memories, I’m increasingly able to interact with other people.

Finally, some of my social quirks are just part of my personality. But they’ve always been heightened in predictably stressful contexts, such as miscarriages of justice, or spending time around other gay men. As I wrote last month in “Artificial Emotional Intelligence,” this has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced over the last four years: 

PTSD had the effect of moving me several notches further away from “normal” on the autism spectrum, particularly in my interactions with other gay men. I’ve lost much of my already dubious ability to read ordinary social cues. Faces are a blank. Nowadays I can’t tell if someone is hitting on me, or challenging me to a duel.  

Lately I’ve been reading John Elder Robison’s book Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian. I can relate to many of his tales and tips about life as a social misfit. On the other hand, the recent improvements in my mental health have included exciting progress in this area. I recognized my biggest breakthrough a couple of weeks ago, when I was treated by 911 medics and sent to the hospital for the first time in my life. (A bunch of fierce Canadian drag queens pushed me down the backstage stairs at the Granville Island Revue Stage. Allegedly. It’s a complicated story. You’ll have to read “Falling Can Be A Drag” for yourself.)

When abusive treatment by my new Bellingham employers first triggered strange new anxiety symptoms, the most visible sign was a dramatic increase in my formerly mild case of trichotillomania – the compulsion to pull out your hair. I began ferociously rubbing my forehead and yanking out what's left of the hair above it. Most of the time I’m unaware it’s happening. By the end of particularly stressful days, my scalp is raw. To mitigate the effect, I learned to fiddle instead with over-sized pipe cleaners – “fuzzy things.”

Ironically, my trichotillomania is worse than ever. I’ve exhausted the supply of fuzzy pipe cleaners at the Michael’s craft store in Bellingham. So I may have to plan a special trip to Seattle this week, just to stock up on fuzzy things and coronavirus supplies. 

If you insist on searching for a silver lining in the plagues I’ve endured over the last four years, particularly the impact of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or rather the impact of my former employers’ horrifying treatment that triggered PTSD symptoms), there is one obvious candidate:  my new-found freedom from decades of debilitating writer’s block. If nothing else, writing has been essential to each improvement in my mental health.

However, I’m tempted to argue the most important change has been to transform my trauma-inspired “fixed mindset” into a “growth mindset.” Here is psychologist Carol Dweck's definition of each type of mindset:

In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it. 

One image from Dweck’s book Mindset sticks with me. It comes from her description of a child psychology experiment. Researchers can accurately distinguish between students with a fixed mindset and those with a growth mindset by assigning each child a set of challenging brainteasers. In my mind, Dweck’s example of the boy with a fixed mindset sounds just like my son now, or me for three decades – wearily sighing at the prospect of work and failure. In contrast, Dweck’s growth mindset youth rubs his hands together and exclaims “I love puzzles!” 

Being forced to deal with one real disaster after another over the last few years eventually taught me how to bounce back from repeated failure. Life is good and getting better. Still, I hope my PTSD-induced symptoms will go away someday. Maybe I will be magically cured once my villainous abusers finally take responsibility for their actions. Or when the courts order them to take responsibility. I know it’s just a theory, but humor me. 

Nevertheless, if losing two years of my life and pulling out my hair every day forever are the worst things that ever happen to my family, I’ll take it.

Previously in Rock Bottom Stories: “Maximum Leverage.”   Next: “Least Gay Great Day Ever.”

People with PTSD should consider switching back to Comcast. Someday....

It all started with my landlord Carl’s cryptic handwriting.

Our house in Bellingham is part of an intergenerational oasis on the forested slopes of Sehome Hill. We share a lush acre-plus garden with a second house across the pond, where my retiree landlord and several boarders live. When I moved in two years ago, I transferred my longstanding Comcast account from our Seattle apartment to the Bellingham house. Each month, evil monopolist Comcast sent a bill and accepted my payment for internet and cable television services.

At the end of every month, Carl leaves a post-it note on my desk lamp with his mysterious calculation of each tenant’s share of the various communal utilities. His handwriting is illegible, so it was several months before I figured out one of the squiggles said “Comcast.” There’s only one cable running to my house. Carl had been paying Comcast (and then charging me) for the exact same internet and television service, at the exact same address, that Comcast had already billed me for.

As I previously reported, this discovery resulted in several unpleasant telephone conversations with increasingly senior Comcast representatives, culminating in my first experience with a customer-service-induced PTSD episode.

  

Comcast eventually stopped its fraudulent billing practice. But they told Carl they wouldn’t even discuss any refund of our double payment until we returned every piece of electronic equipment that had ever been registered at my address. (They refused to talk to me about it at all, purportedly out of concern for Carl’s privacy.)

It took a while, but I gathered all the outdated cable boxes and routers that prior tenants had abandoned in various corners of the house. I carried my box of obsolete treasures to Comcast’s spacious local customer “service” center. Where I enjoyed yet another PTSD-symptom-triggering example of Comcast’s wretched customer service.

Like the hero in a fairy tale, I dutifully performed every crazy task I was assigned. Nevertheless, Comcast continued to ignore Carl’s and my complaints about their months of fraudulent double billing.

Fortunately, Comcast’s competitor CenturyLink finally ran their fibre-optic cable up the hill. Meanwhile, like everyone else in America, the kids discovered so many online television alternatives we stopped watching broadcast TV altogether. It only took a short trip to the Comcast customer service center to cut the cord. As I reported at the time, “I never did receive any credit from Comcast for my months of double payments….”  

I didn’t want to gum up our quickie divorce with another futile spat over double payments. Instead, I decided to play the long game. I began by refusing to make any payments to Comcast for the last few months of our relationship, ultimately ending up with $367 in unpaid charges as of the date of our dissolution.

My separation from Comcast was final in October 2017. They kept mailing me increasingly belligerent bills. I ignored them.

Comcast tried calling my cell phone, but I screen my calls. I don’t remember Comcast leaving any messages where they identified themselves. But I recognized the sound of Comcast’s heavy breathing, as well as the familiar clicks and dropped calls of their so-called “customer service.”

Eventually the communications from Comcast stopped. Instead, earlier this year I got a letter from a Seattle-area collection agency informing me they were about to take legal steps to obtain the money Comcast claimed it was entitled to.

This is exactly what I had been waiting for. The collection agency enclosed a form asking whether I disputed Comcast’s claimed debt, together with a self-addressed envelope. I checked the “disputed” box, explained the nature of my dispute with Comcast in one sentence, and mailed back the form.

A couple of weeks later, the calls from Comcast began again. I still didn’t answer. This time they left messages. I didn’t listen to them. But the new iPhone operating system now delivers garbled transcriptions of all your voice messages. I skimmed a few. Finally, I wrote down the return telephone number.

I waited for a lovely day: kids gone, house clean, sun out, etc. I put on my favorite pajamas, read a good book, wrote about beer, made a caprese salad, meditated, poured some tea, paused the classical music, took a deep breath, and called Comcast.

Adam, the nice customer service rep, explained how Comcast calculated the amount due for the final months of service at the house. I listened politely, then explained how the claimed amount was more than offset by the amount Carl and I are due from Comcast for the extended period of illegal double billing. Adam conceded there were several interesting notes in my file, but gave me the familiar spiel about Carl's account being a complete mystery.

I told Adam I realized he wasn't in a position to resolve my concerns himself; I just wanted to make sure Comcast understood exactly why I disputed their claim. I explained that if Comcast continued its harassing collection efforts, I would respond with fraud and Consumer Protection Act counterclaims. I suggested it would cost Comcast a lot more than $367 to pursue an outraged lawyer with PTSD, regardless of the ultimate outcome or the (dubious) merits of their position. My rough mental estimate was that Carl and I were probably due a refund of about $400, close enough for all parties to be tempted by a “walk away.” That’s usually the smoothest way to resolve any legal dispute. So I suggested it might be in everyone's interest to just chill.

I managed to make it through the call with no meltdowns or excessive profanity. (I don't count describing Comcast's customer service as "shitty"; surely I'm not the first person to tell the truth when asked for the reason they’re dumping Comcast.) After making sure Adam had captured each of my bullet points, I thanked him and hung up. Gently.

Continuing with my zen strategy, I waited to see what would happen next.

Four days later

Today Carl stopped by to show me a letter he got out of the blue from Comcast. Without any further prompting or explanation, Comcast enclosed a $711 refund check for the closed account at my address. Carl endorsed the check over to me, and now I'll send Comcast my final payment. In due time.

I’m happy for Comcast, which continues to provide the occasional shining example of excellent customer service, blinking out there against a bleak backdrop of supercilious incompetence.   Learning from our mistakes is the hallmark of intelligence, real or artificial. Of course, I'm not sure whether I would ever get back in a relationship with Comcast – I'm codependent, not stupid. For now, I'll just wait and give CenturyLink's broadband service a chance to annoy me.

I’m happiest for me, because I managed to resolve an unpleasant and unfair situation calmly and effectively. It feels a lot like spring these days.

Previous Comcast Customer Service Chronicles

July 11, 2017:  “Maybe people with PTSD should just switch to DirecTV”

July 21, 2017:  “People with PTSD definitely should switch to DirecTV”

October 13, 2017:  “People with back problems, PTSD, or any other issues really should switch from Comcast”