Lake City, Florida USA is the home of a rather unconventional school, New Generation. It is a non-profit, private school for students grade 6th through 12th that are at risk of dropping out of school due to educational difficulties. With a maximum population of 60 students, New Generation has an astounding success rate amongst a category of students that most of society has given up on. However, this is not the only unique property of this school. A visitor would be hard pressed to find a Microsoft operating system in use on campus.
Since I am the geek son of the school’s founder, Paula Gorman, I help out with their technology whenever I am in town. For the first year of it’s existence, New Generation was running Windows XP. Since this resulted in a computer lab that was unusable more often than not, it was an easy sell to convince Mrs. Gorman to switch to Ubuntu Linux.
This morning, the school was having problems with it’s Comcast cable Internet connection, so Mrs. Gorman decided to call Comcast tech support. During the course of the of the phone conversation, the tech support agent requested that Mrs. Gorman click various buttons to try to open up the Windows XP graphical interface for ping, at which point she informed them that she was not running Windows, but Ubuntu. Mrs. Gorman is no geek, but she does know how to use the ping command in the terminal, so she offered to do just that. However, the Comcast tech support agent at that point would not help further, due to his inexperience with Linux.
Mrs. Gorman decided to obtain a case number, so that I could call later on her behalf, to determine the issue. However, the support agent refused to give her the case number, restating the fact that Comcast does not support Linux. He even went as far to say that the company supports Windows, Mac OSX, and even Unix (note that both Linux and OSX are a form of Unix), but not Linux. Needless to say, Mrs. Gorman was not pleased with this response. I would not want to have been the Comcast employee during the resulting conversation. For the next several minutes, she chastised the employee about the evils of discriminating against a customer due to their choice in operating system. Once thoroughly chastised, the employee was more forthcoming with the case number. The funny thing was, the Internet was working again just a few hours later, without me touching any of the networking equipment and without Comcast fixing anything
The teachers at New Generation school have enjoyed using Ubuntu Linux over the past several years, and do not take kindly to being discriminated against by a telecom company. Therefore, they are looking at switching to T1 Internet service via AT&T. Perhaps AT&T will be more friendly to Linux users.
I think it would be rather fun to make the displeasure of Comcast’s Linux customers loudly known. If you would like to spend a few minutes letting Comcast know that is wrong to discriminate against customers due to their choice of operating system, the phone number to the Lake City, Fl. office is (386) 752-6161.
