The "Do Not TroubleShoot List"

I'm sick and tired of Comcast's support staff. They used to be ok. They'd ask something insipid like "what operating system are you using" and I'd say "what in the hell does my operating system have anything to do with your engineerings re-IP'ing the local edge ? " and they'd put me right through to their tier 3 guys who would admit they re-IP'd without telling anyone and give me some new IPs to use.

That's all changed in recent years though. No doubt like every good ginormous company they fired all their best people and replaced them with a whole bunch of low-end cheap staff whom follow "heuristics" and make pretty "metrics".

After 8 years - 8 FRICKING YEARS - I've had enough. I'm getting a FIOS line installed next week and will run parallel for a month or two then decide which to stay with. The funny thing is, if anyone of the "techs" who've been floundering had just read my prior tickets, they probably would have seen the clues and just escalated me right away, or better yet, taken my word for it when I tell them their cable modem's shot.

But nooooo, they have to troubleshoot. I can almost hear them turning the pages of their flowcharts, trying to figure out where I fit in their manual. I've managed the largest websites in the world. I can tell the techs more about the RF signal to my modem than they can. I don't need troubleshooting. The latest gems:

Tech: "What makes you think the ethernet port it out ? "
Me: "Well, because after 6 years of building networks I've figured out how to troubleshoot the physical layer."

Tech: Let me ask you this, when you have the ethernet hooked up, do you get an IP address ?
Me: No, because to get an IP address you'd need to be able to communicate DHCP over TCP/IP which would require an LLC link which, as I stated in my chief complaint, my modem's ethernet port doesn't have.