Consumer satisfaction reports consistently place cable companies at the low end of the approval spectrum, if not the lowest. There are any number of reasons one could try and pin this on – high subscription fees, unreasonably huge mergers – but we all know what it really comes down to: those damn cable guys.

Well, it’s probably not exactly fair to pin it on the cable guys, who most likely just go where they’re told each day, and proceed to do their job as best as they can. But horror stories abound about waiting for them to arrive, stuck at home for hours, or even days at a time, never quite sure when they might actually come, but loathe to leave the house for fear they’ll choose that exact minute to show up, only to leave again and start the whole process anew.

Well aware that it is already perceived with great skepticism thanks to, among other reasons, its $45 billion proposal to acquire Time Warner Cable, Comcast is trying to deflect angst from itself by apparently beefing up its customer service. CEO Brian Roberts told “USA TODAY” last week that the company is preparing to release a new app that simplifies the (dis)appointment-making process associated with set-top box repair.

In an unexpected twist, the app, which lacks an official name to date, is modeled after Uber, an app that connects passengers with a network of independent drivers-for-hire. As Uber sends the rider-in-need’s location to the nearest Uber driver, the Comcast app would let the user send their location to the nearest cable guy. The user can then track the progress of their cable guy as his repair van moves along a map within the app toward their humble abode.

Of course, being able to observe the cable guy’s movements on your device screen doesn’t make him move any faster, but there is a kind of psychological comfort in at least seeing that he actually exists, and that you haven’t been screaming into the labyrinthine echo chamber of Comcast’s phone service for two hours for nothing. And at a logistical level, it seems possible that a system that only sends a cable guy to the next nearest location might streamline the current process wherein he must stick to a pre-made schedule of stops, regardless of the logic of their geographical distribution.

Or maybe this is all just smoke and mirrors, a shiny new plaything from a company desperate to communicate to consumers that it cares, even in spite of the fact that it really, truly doesn’t.

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