No, it's not a Polar Vortex. Discovery.com:

Wacky? What's next, zany tornados? Madcap thunderstorms?

Ahem. We care. We really do. We just get a little summer. Seems cruel to add fall so early. Then again, well:

I was there yesterday. Deserted. For some peculiar reason people aren't just stocking up on glue pens yet.

I know that glue pens will be on the list of supplies; they always are. Sent daughter to school last year with a package of three. At the end of the year they were unopened. I don't know where they are now; I do know I will buy three more in a month or so. They will be Elmer brand, because I like Elmer the Borden Bull. In the old 1940s ads he's a blustering, hectoring, ill-tempered, impulsive fellow, constantly sputtering dismay over his wife Elsie's monomaniacal shilling for Borden products, but I think there was some underlying tension over her high public profile. Elmer worked in an office - we know this because he was frequently depicted leaving the house with a briefcase, and while it's possible he wandered the streets, alarming people - a bull, standing erect, wearing a hat, walking around as if he had to get in early to work on the Johnson Contract would be unnerving - but perhaps he knew that Elsie brought in the cream, so to speak. I don't know if she set him up in the glue business, or if he started it himself after the calves were out of the house and she divorced him.

PLEASE DON'T GO The most astonishing customer assistance call ever recorded for future generations to understand how you can combine cheerfulness, anonymity and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It's a Mobius strip. Embedding isn't working for some reason, so here it is. It's mortifying.

"Why do you want to do this?"

"Because that's what we want to do."

"Why?"

"That's none of your business."

"But why do you want to leave?"

After four minutes you suspect it's a hoax, because the the caller is too calm, and the Comcast rep isn't just indifference to the customer, he becomes the needy, whiny partner you can't break up with easily, but must endure several conversations. NO ONE ELSE WILL LOVE YOU LIKE I DO!

The OP describes the backstory:

In the comments he is described as the Mother Theresa of Comcast Disconnect Requestors, and that's about right.

Then again, the Awl has some sympathy for the fellow doing the begging.

True. The guy could have made up a reason - say, "knobby-fleshed demons are streaming from my modem, praising Baal and making my Bibles burst into flames," but he didn't have to, and if he wanted to go all Bartleby on the guy, that's that.

Comcast seems to know this is a PR disaster: here's their statement.

Picture the service rep standing in the middle of the office as his commanding manager ripped off his service patches. Well, there's nothing left for him but personal appearances in bars that have D-list media celebrities. Bad news; David Brent cancelled. We'll have to go with the Comcast rep.

VotD Made in Minnesota: the great bands of the 80s revisited, with trips back to the old locales.