I feel like if something this dumb happened now, there'd be no way to get it resolved that quickly, and without hiring a lawyer. Getting Comcast lawyers to respond to you at all is the one bit in particular I can't picture happening.
I didn't notice right away so a couple months went by. I called them, they stopped charging me, and credited my cable account back. But what is utterly crazy, is that that credit is never used. The months come and go by, and balance is still -$50 (i.e. I have an over payment of 50)
I called a few times to get to money back, because, it's my money. I received 3 different explanations that were obviously made up and contradicting each other (call centers make shit up all the time). Eventually someone told me the balance will be paid off when I close my account and the only way I have to recover it is to change operators. Except they don't have competition where I am.
It's trivial, not a jail time, but this simple enough process of "take that amount and write a cheque" is already impossible because a) no-one knows b) no-one cares c) I'm not gonna sue on such a low amount d) I can't leave e) there's no incentive whatsoever for anyone to expand some effort to understand what is happening to my account f) no-one has any sort of any power, and escalations are a myth
And yeah, I expect if this happened to anyone today, the first bit of advice anyone (including myself) would give them would be to get a lawyer to handle it.
You can get away with ignoring customer complaints, but generally not their lawsuits, unless you're okay with losing by default.
There's also a general feeling that the pandemic "changed things". I can't quite put my finger on the whole extent of that, but I can definitely see the overall feeling of everyone being out for themselves contributing to shamelessly playing the BATNA.
Whenever that happens, I am reminded of what my life was like when all of my work emails were promptly responded to. I am also reminded that I should be glad to have escaped a world where such timeliness-at-all-hours is the expectation!