Good Customer Service? From Whom?

OK, I know this is going to be a bit shocking to some of you, but here goes...

Over the past week I experienced great customer service from ... (drumroll please) ... our cable company, Comcast.

Could someone throw some water on that guy who just passed out in the back row?

From the vitriol heaped upon Comcast's door by many a dissatisfied customer, you would hardly expect such a good experience. In fact, I've had bad experiences with them myself, which is why I often wait to call them -- expecting nothing useful to come of it.

Still, we had recently upgraded our service to digital cable and things weren't working quite correctly. So I got out my phone headset and settled in for the usual hour-and-a-half phone call.

And got through within five minutes.

Not only did I get through, but I actually chatted with someone, her name was Marnee, who could actually start the repair process. When that didn't work, she immediately scheduled me for a repair visit on Tuesday (I was calling on Saturday). She apologized that it would take so long and then told me that if I wanted a visit sooner, I should call back first thing in the morning to see if there had been any cancellations. I wasn't concerned about that, so I decided to wait until Tuesday.

Of course, as with most scheduled repairs, I was given a window, "sometime between 9:30 and 12:30", which, to my cynical mind, meant "sometime on Tuesday, maybe". To my shock and surprise, on Tuesday at 10:30, a neatly uniformed young man showed up and, within an hour, had cleared out three or four different problems with my cable setup which resulted in a clearer picture and access to all of the cool video-on-demand features which I had been promised.

Wow.

As he cleaned up his equipment, he told me that he was pretty sure that he had gotten it all working, but if there were any problem,s here was his supervisor's direct line. Call him and I wouldn't even have to go through the five minutes of calling the toll-free line.

OK, I've got to say that Comcast just jumped several notches in my book. Of course, now I'm going to expect more of them. Will they be able to deliver? We'll find out today. Last night, when I was trying to watch a movie from video-on-demand, my main system suddenly started having trouble. I'll let you know how it goes.

So, what what completely unexpected good customer service have you received recently?