<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, frank eliason]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, frank eliason]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/frankeliason http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/frankeliason <![CDATA[Entitled, whiny white tech workers find new way to get prompt service from Comcast]]> I couldn't help but notice a trend in the New York Times report about bloggers and Twitter users who have gotten superior service from Comcast after complaining about the cable company online: They are all white. Brandon Dilbeck, William Pomerantz, Lyza Gardner: white, white, white. Oh, and all involved with the technology industry. And yet they all seem to be under the delusion that they are powerless and that no one listens to them. In fact, Comcast has assigned a white person, Frank Eliason, to listen to white people's complaints on Twitter and blogs full-time. Gardner seems like an especially noisome kind of white Twitter user — the one who will gladly talk behind your back when you're not listening, but then acts surprised when you overhear her:

"It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview. It’s another, she said, when the company replies. “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

In her preposterously self-fawning online biography, Gardner writes: "I am, in short, a product of the Web. I am a mashup." All too true.

Why do all of these people who live online, constantly communicating, persist in some kind of paranoid delusion that no one listens to them? Lyza, if you have something to say to Comcast, don't tell your Twitter followers one thing and the nice white man from Philadelphia another. Stick to your guns. Stab them in the face, not the back. Your Web-development clients should wonder what you spit about them when they're not on Twitter.

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5029272&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Comcast customer complains company invades his personal space by reading public messages]]> A Comcast customer in Pittsburgh is not amused that Comcast cares. As Twitter user gpk3, he wrote "Comcast sucks," causing Frank Eliason, Comcast's Customer Outreach manager who keeps tabs on Twitter to respond "Welcome to Twitter. How can I change your perception?" The customer was not amused, accusing Comcast of invading his "personal space." And by "personal space" he seems to mean "messages publicly available to the world on the Internet," causing a few Twitterers to come to Comcast's defense. The person I feel sorry for isn't Eliason, though he has to put up with a lot representing the company. No, it's Comcast shareholders, who are actually surrendering some of their hard-earned monopoly profits to pay someone to use Twitter.

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