I cannot pay my Rezu-Rezu account's bills because of what I'm about to unload about. I'm done being polite about this. I'm also done with being confidential about this. It's time the world knew how retarded your back-end IT infrastructure really is.

I'm getting sick and tired of your online payment system. For cripe's sake, you're an ISP, your talent, of all people, should know how to implement a scalable, yet easy to use, 3-tier database-driven web experience.

Monthly, I receive e-mail notices to the effect that my account is due. It's addressed to my preferred e-mail address. Awesome — this is what I want. However, ever since changing my account to a business account, YOU have had an inconsistent database record. Your system continues to think I have PayDirect account open, while whenever I try to log in, it tells me to go piss off. No combination of username or password works.

Worse still, when I try to recreate my PayDirect account, it tells me I AM ALREADY IN THE SYSTEM.

The last time I asked about this over the phone, you said that the business customers and the residential customers are in separate physical databases, and that information from one hasn't been completely transferred to the other. You also promised to fix the problem, which should take about one or two pay periods to see the change.

I see nothing.

The solution to this problem is trivially simple: DO NOT MAINTAIN SEPARATE CUSTOMER TABLES BASED ON SERVICE CLASS. Instead, you should have exactly one table that lists all of your customers, regardless of whether or not they've signed up to PayDirect services. If you find that one table is too slow for your needs, then you can use a technique called sharding to distribute the load, but the whole collection of shards is treated as one logical table.

This (potentially shareded) table, then, would use boolean flags to indicate whether they've subscribed to PayDirect, or whether they're a business-class customer, etc.

This has many advantages for you; but, particularly relevant to me as a paying customer, is your online system would never have an inconsistent state. Upgrading a customer's account is as simple as adjusting a single cell in a single row in a single table. No mistakes are even possible with this approach. And since you're dealing with something that ultimately earns Comcast real cash value, isn't the possibility of zero-mistakes worth it?

So, either fix your #$*!ing database system, or fix my account settings. PLEASE!!!

This is getting just plain RETARDED.

I will call you ONCE MORE to get my bill paid.

Thank you for letting me vent.