All the accounts

I don’t watch a lot of television so Randy managed all the services we have. Sometime around a year before he died he went on a kind of purge, wanting to lower my monthly expenses in preparation for his death. He changed out our big trash bin for a smaller one, saving I don’t know how much money - how much could it possibly be?

He also cancelled our cable services but left several streaming services. I have all the account numbers and passwords and canceled most, but when I tried to change Xfinity/Comcast (wifi and maybe cell phones?) I was told that I would have to take a copy of the death certificate into a physical store and I really didn’t feel up to it. I asked if it would make any difference if I left it in Randy’s name and was told it would not.

But…it turns out that Hulu (ad free, of course) was being billed through Xfinity, so in order to cancel it ($17 per month!) I had to call Xfinity. They make it hard, try to get you to go to the webiste, lie and tell you it will be an hour and a half to get a live human, and so on.

I actually reached someone fairly quickly, probably someone in the Philipines - I can tell by the way they pronounce my name - and the call followed a script, offering me no chance to explain my question. What is your name, confirm your address, your telephone number… And of course she discovered the account is in Randy’s name - which I could have told her if she had been able to move off the damned script.

So then she read off her script, with me trying to interrupt - “Randy hasn’t named you an administrator of the account, so” and I said “Wait” and she said, “May I speak with Randy?” And my heart sank. I said “He died last year.” And then I got all the useless sympathy that made me grit my teeth the first time I went through all these calls, “So sorry for your loss” - they usually say this at least 3 times in a call.

Finally, she allowed me to tell her what I wanted. I want to cancel my Hulu subscription. She told me, incorrectly, that I would need to cancel through Hulu. I told her that the Hulu account is billed through Xfinity and the Hulu people told me I would have to cancel through them.

She told me that she could cancel it, while at the same time obviously texting or slacking someone to find out how to get Randy’s name off the account - which was not what I asked for. And every time she would say something she would follow her script and call me Randy, because that was the name on the screen, and then she would remember and correct herself. And then she asked if I still had Randy’s death certificate. Answer in my mind: Yes, yes I do. And I really don’t want to be talking about this.

She opened a ticket and told me someone would call within 2 weeks and tell me how to upload the death certificate.

And there you go - I don’t know how long I cried after that, but I was weepy for the rest of the day.