75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw, took the aforementioned implement to her local Comcast office in Manassas to settle a score, and boy, did she!
This was after the company had scheduled installation of its much ballyhooed "Triple Play" service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services, in Shaw's brick home in nearby Bristow. But Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but left with the job half done. On Friday morning, they cut off all service.
So on that Friday, Mona Shaw and her husband, Don, went to the local call center office to complain.
Let's pick it up, mid-action, according to Shaw:
Mona demands to speak to a manager. A customer service representative says someone will be right with them. Directs them to a bench, outside. (Remember, it's mid-August.) Mona and Don sit.
Tick, tick, tick, goes the clock. Sit, sit, sit, go Mona and Don.
For. Two. Hours.
And then -- this is the best part -- the customer rep leans out the door and says the manager has left for the day. Thanks for coming!
So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don's claw hammer and said: "C'mon, honey, we're going to Comcast."
Shaw stormed in the company's office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!
"They cuffed me right then," she says.
Her take on Comcast: "What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."
Being a responsible newspaper, we must note that this is a misdemeanor, a crime, a completely inappropriate way of handling a business dispute.
"I scared the tar out of some people, at least," she says. "It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset. . . . After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ' Now do I have your attention?' "
It wasn't all fun.
By the time it was over, she recalls, there were an ambulance, two police cruisers and a sergeant's car in the parking lot. Shaw received a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, a $345 fine in restitution and a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office.
From what we can tell, Mona Shaw is not, actually, a raving lunatic armed with construction tools.
She is a nice lady who lives in a nice house. She and Don are both retired from the Air Force (she was a registered nurse). They have been married 45 years. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). She has a heart condition. She lifts weights at a local gym. The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church.
Police gave her the hammer back, though she swears she's content to ride off into the sunset of True Crime Stories in America, never again to go Com-smash-tic on her local cable provider.
She does, however, finally, have phone service.
On Verizon.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702359_3.html?hpid=artslot
75 yr old gives Comcast a hammering blow
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