I have been properly punished by the TiVo gods for my decision to defect to Comcast’s DVR.
Let’s see, where do we begin. Last week, I called Comcast and ordered a DVR and requested to move the digital box to the bedroom. They scheduled the service for between 1 and 5, with a 30 minute call ahead. Okay, cool. Weekend passes, and Monday morning, Holly and I weren’t feeling well. We decided to stay home until 11 before going to school/work. At 11am, it appeared that the Internet was down. Investigation revealed no television service either. I called Comcast on the way to take Holly to classes and reported a total outage. They said they would open a ticket to investigate, but it might be a line issue…. but wait, there’s more.
Monday night, still no service. I call back, and they say a service call was scheduled for Wednesday morning. I said that I was frustrated by the extended outage. The person at Comcast said that they had it down as an Internet outage and that they try to schedule something within 24 hours for total outages. I had to hang up while she had me on hold because I was due to get my hair cut. I get home and call back, during a thunderstorm. They say it’s probably due to a power outage and asked if I had power. “Uhh… yeah.” was my response. They say I’m scheduled for Wednesday morning. I point out that I have an appointment for a service upgrade on Tuesday and she says “Oh, well, they’ll probably look at it then since they have to have the Cable up to install the DVR.” Wow, mental giant there.
So, today, I decide to come home at 2:30 to be here when they came. About 2:45, Holly is trying to get me to go to CVS with her to get some Advil, when we see a guy pull up in a old minivan and get out. He’s holding a Comcast work ticket and is walking towards our door… oh, wait… yep, that’s him pounding on the door. Nice 30 minute call ahead, asshole. “Hi, I’m from Comcast. You’re getting a DVR?” “Yes, but, the cable service has been down since yesterday morning. They said you could look at that.” Apparently, they neglected to indicate that on his work order. He hooked up a tone generator and went to find our line. He came back and said it was disconnected because it was labelled as apartment C, but, there was another plug for apartment C that was connected. So, he relabelled it and tested everything out. He lectured me about needing to keep air open around the DVR so it doesn’t overheat and crash “or they’ll make you buy it, and it ain’t cheap.” Great, okay. He gets out his Nextel phone and radios in. “I’m taking out a digital box and putting in a dvr. Let me know when you’re ready.” I say “Um, we’re supposed to get a digital receiver for the bedroom” to which he responds “Oh. Okay, they didn’t put that on the order.” We put the digital box in the bedroom, everything is working, happy days. The guy was an overall asshole though. He was very terse and not polite.
After the guy left, we were playing around trying to learn how the silly thing works. We look for the Swap button that allows you to use the second tuner… but it’s not there. Neither is a bunch of other buttons the manual says are there. So, I call them up. The guy I get calls over to a few other areas and says they are out of DVR remotes, but they will be happy to schedule another 4 hour window for me to sit at the house waiting for someone to come by and give me a remote, or I can go to one of their service centres and swap it (both are significant distances away). Great. Okay, what about the 36 hour outage, what can you guys do to make it right.? “We can credit your account $4.03 for one day of service.” “How about you let me speak to a supervisor.” “Okay, I’ll try to get a supervisor for you if I can.” Hold for 5 minutes “No supervisors are available. I’ll have one call you in 24-48 business hours.” Great again. TiVo was laughing at me.
I call to cancel the TiVo service, and I get a guy who sounds like he was straight from the woods. Very thick hillbilly accent and poor English skills. He admired that I was a TiVo subscriber for 5 years and offered me 2 months free service to use with the TiVo in the bedroom to see if we’d like it there. I said okay, because we can always cancel it in two months. So, TiVo lives on in the bedroom.
Between this cluster and the lack of a weekend (spent all weekend rebuilding Traci’s room), I had no initiative to go to class, so, I didn’t. Now, I’m sitting here while the DVR records Bones for Holly watching Nova on PBS-HD. The show wasn’t recorded in HD natively, but, it still looks good. Better than it did on the TiVo.