. . . or maybe fun’s uncle. You know, the uncle they keep locked in the attic?
Donna likes to watch NCIS. I like to watch reruns of The Office. Naturally, the shows are scheduled head to head. Time for TIVO.
Comcast, our cable provider, offers DVR capability for $8.95 a month. So I called to upgrade our service. The lady on the phone said it would cost $15 a month. “But your web site says $8.95,” I said. “Oh, not in Tucson,” she said. I knew I’d be wasting my breath mentioning that I’d already entered my address and ZIP into the web site, which said it would find pricing for my area, so I just asked what I needed to do. “Take your old cable box to a Comcast service outlet and exchange it for a DVR cable box.”
Which I did. The man at the Comcast service outlet told me to call Comcast after hooking up the new box in order to have it activated, and wrote out the serial number for me to read to the tech over the phone.
Back home, box hooked up, I called and gave the tech the number. He said it should be working in a few minutes. Fine.
Not fine. An hour later it was still not working, so I called again. After wading through the automated menu a second time, I got a different tech. All was going well until he asked for the other number. “What other number?” “Oh, we also need the cable card number.” “Why didn’t the guy at the service center tell me that?” “I don’t know, but we can’t activate the box without the other number.”
The box, of course, is now hooked up, held firmly in place by cables and wires, with a DVD player (also held firmly in place by cables, etc) on top of it. I’m on my knees, phone in one hand and magnifying glass in the other as my wife tilts the box one way and another, shining a flashlight underneath and along the sides so that I can read numbers to the tech. There are six little stickers on the sides and back of the box, each with a different number. The tech, in between punching in the numbers I read to him, entertains me with stories about his dogs.
No number seems to be the one he’s looking for, and I’ve run out of stickers to squint at and read. He tells me I’ll have to take the box back to the service center and get another one, and to be sure to get both numbers this time. Something tells me the tech is wrong. But it’s late, the service center is closed, and there’s nothing more I can do that night.
This afternoon I show up back at the service center, box in hand. “What other number?” asks the service center guy. I tell him the story and he gets on the phone with Comcast. It takes him half an hour to sort things out, but it turns out he was right . . . there is but one number, and I leave the service center with the promise that when I plug in the box all will be well.
And of course it isn’t well, not at all. So I call again. Automated menu hell, etc, etc. I finally get a tech, tell tale yet again, and he suggests that I check the connections.
I’m so anal, I’d taken a photo of the connectors before I ever unhooked the old cable box:
Naturally, I hooked the cables to the new box in the same order. So I know everything’s correct, but I insert my head in the narrow space between the back of the box and the wall and check anyway. The only possible ambiguity (everything else is color-coded) is the coaxial cable connection on the right side of the photo. You can see two threaded coax jacks on the back of the box. I’d hooked it up according to the photo (well, you know where this is going, don’t you . . . of course you do!) . . . yes, on the new box the coax jacks are reversed. I disconnect the cable, touch it to the other jack, and Ellen Degeneres instantly fills the screen.
Hey, what’s one night without TV? At least I got to talk to a fellow about his dogs.
On Twitter, you’d have to say all this using 140 characters or less. For posterity, here’s my tweet: “The Comcast customer service experience. Standing on your head in a bucket of shit. Not much difference.”
That’s still pretty much true, so I’ll let it stand. But I certainly contributed to the mess by not hooking up my cable correctly, so I’ll have to amend my tweet with a clarifying tweet: “The bucket of shit was optional, but I stuck my head in it anyway.”
Update (04/30/09, 10:30 pm): This DVR is the greatest thing since sliced bread! While watching Transporter 3 (which sucked), I recorded The Office, The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and Southland.
Update (05/01/09, 9:20 am): Well, what do you know! I put a link to this blog entry on Facebook, and this morning a Comcast representative contacted me to apologize for the difficulty I experienced and to ask what they could do better. So now I have to clarify, because I really do appreciate it that someone from Comcast cares enough to take my bitching seriously. Yes, the experience of finding out about, pricing, obtaining, installing, and activating a DVR box was unnecessarily difficult. But I am the one, ultimately, who connected the input cable to the wrong jack, so a large part of the whole unpleasant experience was my own fault.