One of my favorite gags in media is where the unassuming looking guy that people either make fun of or ignore turns out to be a Secret Master of some art.

Today I finally met one.

Some backstory:  A few months ago, I needed to update the credit card for my Comcast Xfinity account.  I couldn’t do it on their website because their website is painfully slow on a good day and on the particular day I was trying to update it the website would just throw timeout errors when trying to load my account info.

So I called Xfinity customer support, and a polite gentleman helped me update my payment info.  And then he launched into a sales pitch about how wouldn’t I like to get my internet bill cut in half and by the way he could send me a free iPad and… honestly it just kind of washed over me.  It was painfully apparent that he was selling me something and that his sales tactic was to talk so fast that his victim didn’t have time to think.

But, he had been incredibly helpful and, frankly, charming so I figured I would help him hit whatever metric his bosses were trying to have him hit and then go to their retail store and figure out what I’d been sold.

So I said yes to everything he offered me and we ended the call.  A few days later, an iPad arrived and I trotted over to Xfinity to ask what the catch was.

It turned out that the catch was that I’d gotten the iPad for half price and I was now paying 20 bucks a month for mobile data and like six bucks monthly for the iPad on an installment plan.  Still this was cheaper than my cable internet bill had been before, and I was honestly kind of curious how useful a cellular iPad might be so I kept it and I kept the mobile data.  The guy at the Xfinity store seemed legitimately surprised that I didn’t blow up and ask for a refund, but… well, I had to give the phone support guy credit for being nice and helpful BEFORE the hustle ensued.

It also turned out that a cellular iPad is VERY handy.  Like, you think “well there’s WiFi everywhere” or “I can just tether off my phone” and then you actually use a device where you just unlock it and you immediately have data without needing to deal with a captive portal or with turning on tethering.

So when I bought a new iPad a couple of weeks ago, trying to get ahead of potential price increases due to the ongoing rampocalypse, I went for the cellular model.

But, it needed a cellular plan to work, and with some LLM-assisted searches I eventually discovered that this wasn’t a problem – I could just switch my existing data plan to my new iPad using a self-service tool on the Xfinity website.

I could not find this tool. See above comments about Xfinity’s website being awful. What I DID see was a banner ad for some sort of plan that let me use a combination of up to 10 tablets and watches for $35.  This seemed like a good deal, and I tried to sign up for it… only to be completely stymied because every time I clicked on the banner ad I got taken to a page with no apparent way to add the plan.

So it was off to another Xfinity retail store, where after an hour’s wait (pro tip: make an appointment) I was handed off to a representative who pulled out a piece of paper, wrote “$35” on it and then “2 x 12.50 + 5 x 0” and told me this would be the cost.  When prompted for elaboration, he informed me that this was the monthly cost of two tablets and five watches for my new data plan.  Apparently watches are free? And I needed five of them?  And whatever these tablets are (iPads? Samsungs?) I needed two more of those.

I protested, and asked to simply buy the plan.  This led to being given a variety of versions of “you can’t have this plan unless you buy more hardware today” and being told that I wasn’t listening and didn’t understand how these things worked.

He scribbled different numbers on his paper.  It felt like the thing car dealers do when they are trying to get you to think about the price of a car as a monthly thing and not a total.

I do not like car dealers.  I did not like this guy.

I would like to say that eventually I politely deferred and left.  In honesty I will admit that I was less polite than I liked and told him, as he wasn’t interested in selling me what I wanted to buy I would be leaving.  On the way out I asked the reception desk to make sure that I got a survey.

That was a corporate Xfinity store.  I did not have much hope for the “affiliate” stores, but barring other options I drove over to the next one, where I was assigned a helper after a much shorter wait.  He was on the younger side (late 20s? Maybe early 30s?) so I had hopes that he would be a little more tech-savvy.

It turned out that he was familiar with the plan, and asked me if I wanted to buy a tablet or “bring my own” and critically DID NOT push me to buy a tablet.  He commented on my iPhone’s case having a retro Mac vibe.  He reminisced about trying to play the Oregon Trail game on his grandmother’s Zenith PC.

I was liking this guy.

Once he had the gist of what I wanted, he did some things on his tablet.  It sent me text messages asking me to confirm things.  He scanned my ID.  I signed things.  Eventually my iPad lit up with a new cellular plan.  It was lovely.  But it was not the surprise.

This was the surprise.

After we had the iPad online, I asked if I could add a device to the plan even if it didn’t have an eSIM, and he said that, yes, I could… but it would depend on the bands that the device supported.  This was a familiar concept to me, to a point – I’d run into this when trying to use a US cell phone in Japan.  I mentioned this as sort of an aside, an “yes I’m familiar with the concept” so I didn’t sound like I was completely clueless.

What followed was amazing.  I got a rundown of transmission frequencies used in the US, and those used in Japan, and where the overlaps were.  I got, in what I believe was an extremely abbreviated fashion, a history of the changes from the GSM/CDMA days and the way that the different carriers had leveraged their legacy infrastructure when implementing modern standards.  I was given a flood of information and did my best to stay afloat.

It was breathtaking.  It was being in the presence of someone who Knew His Stuff and had finally found someone who would listen to it.  I genuinely just wanted to take all of the wisdom from his brain and cram it into mine.

I do not know what he is doing peddling mobile plans in an affiliate-branded Xfinity store in a random Oregon strip mall.  I do not know what confluence of coincidences brought me to him.  But I got my iPad its data plan, and I left the store, and I spend several minutes in a state of wondering if I was really awake or if I had just dreamed the encounter.