Comcast crap again, Yards of yard sale junk

So I had a full day planned for my mid-week day off.  I had scheduled Comcast to come out between 7am and 10am to disconnect my cable tv service.  I also planned to coordinate that with getting my antenna hooked up to the house.  I also had to collect stuff from the two sheds to be offered up at the yard sale on Saturday.

So I got up when Ali got up to go for her soon to become traditional Thursday morning run around 5:15 am.  I figured I may as well be up in case Comcast showed up early even though I knew it was a remote possibility. 7 am came and went.

I decided to get dressed and head outside to work on burying my antenna line from the shed to the house.  About half way through the process I decided I would turn the event into a live justin.tv broadcast.   There are a few funny moments in the 18 minutes of footage.

The first is around the 4 minute mark.  I had just got done describing the edger I was given by my great uncle years ago to bury the cable.  I spoke affectionately of how even though it was 30-40 years old it was still quite useful to me.  Then almost on cue, the handle breaks.  I was pissed. The other moment is towards the 17:30 mark.  You can just watch that for yourself.

Throughout the broadcast you will see me mention various times how Comcast had not arrived yet even though it was now after 9am.  I was annoyed but not surprised by their tardiness, after all this was Comcast I was dealing with.

So 10 am came and went and I still had not seen a Comcast van in my driveway.  I still refrained from calling right away, again telling myself Comcast rarely does what they say. Finally when 11 am came and still nobody was there I had enough and picked up the phone.

I was thrilled when I got the message “Due to unusually high call volumes your expected wait will be more than 10 minutes” as I held the phone to my ear.  I was on hold for 20 minutes getting angrier by the second when I heard the call waiting sound on the phone.  Figuring the likelihood of Comcast picking up as still slim I switched over to the other line.

“Hi this is Comcast.  We are just following up to perform a survey on how your service call was” WTF???!!! I said that that’s funny, I was on the other line waiting on hold with Comcast to find out where the hell the tech is, he never showed up!

The woman was embarrassed and said she would find out what the problem was.  After holding for another couple minutes she came back and apologized.  She said a tech should be there within a half hour.  I asked her if she found out what the delay was and why it wasn’t important for Comcast to let customers know when they are going to be late.  She had no answer for either.

Well I hung up, now genuinely angry.  Comcast has tied me to the house for half a day.  I ran the speech I was going to give the tech when he arrived through my head.  Well the half hour timeframe expired.  I waited another full half hour until I decided to follow up again, befuddled at how they could make a SECOND promise of an arrival time and miss it.

I called back and again got the “we have too many people calling and complaining and not enough people to handle them” message.  I said f it, hung up and got on the Comcast web site to do a live chat with someone which only took a minute or two to start.

I banged out my frustration on the keyboard, telling the guy we were now more than two hours past the appointment window and nobody had shown up.  He looked at the information on the call and typed back – “Mr Duffey, the call has been completed and closed”

What?  I never saw anyone?  The virtual rep tells me that the tech put a filter out at the pole on the road that blocks the tv signal but still allows internet to pass through.  As this reality dawned on me I was even more annoyed.

I banged out more to the rep. “Why am I told that I need to be home for this call when the tech doesn’t even come to the house?” “Why was I told on the phone that a tech was going to be out in a half hour if the call was already closed?” and finally “Part of the call was supposed to be the tech picking up the cable cards that were in the Tivo’s, now what?”

The only thing that he could account for was a customer is requested to be home just IN CASE it is necessary to get in the house.  Um ok fine but then would it not make sense to let the customer know that the call is done if you aren’t going to knock on the door?  The lack of common sense in the way the situation was handled was baffling.

So if wasting half of my day waiting was not enough, the rep told me to get credit for the cable cards (and cable modem) I would need to return them to the local Comcast office 20 miles away.  Gee, I get to make a road trip as well to fix your lack of responsibility? Great! Thanks! I just shook my head as I closed the chat window, thinking how fitting that even my attempt to break free of Comcast was marred by yet another bungled effort at customer service on their part.

Like I said I also was returning their cable modem that I was being charged $5 a month to lease.  I finally put Jeremy’s old cable modem into service.  I made a stop at the Comcast office early in the afternoon.  I was helped by a fittingly grumpy woman at the desk that was as friendly as a gargoyle.  I shoved the Comcast equipment across the desk to her, got my receipt that proved I turned it in and got the hell out of there.

Getting all of the yard sale stuff together wasn’t much fun.  I drove the truck into the back yard and used it to load up the stuff.  In addition to unwanted items I threw in a couple plastic shelving units that I broke apart into individual sections to give me additional “table” space.  We have a ton of stuff to unload.

My OTA HD project was a total success.  After burying the cable I attached it to an unused port on the grounding block used for the satellite dish.  After connecting that line in the attic to the splitter I went inside and reconfigured the Tivos for antenna only operation.  The picture quality through out the house looked great, I was very happy with the end result.

Having such a large antenna definitely paid off in this situation.  Being able to push that signal through all of that coax, split it and still get high signal level on all of the tv’s in the house is largely because this antenna is able to pull in digital air transmissions so well.

I also added some plugins to my playon.tv installation to pull in content from various online sources.  I need to get some sort of DLNA compatible device to grab this stuff back in the bedroom.  In the great room I can use the Wii for this purpose although navigation of the playon interface through the Wii is a bit clunky.  Streaming video over the Wii’s wireless connection is less than ideal.  I would much prefer to have it hard wired to my home gigabit network.

It’s kind of ironic that I am back to using the same method for my TV reception that we used in Gouglersville growing up in the 70’s.   However in that situation we only were only able to grab literally 4 or 5 stations and somewhat grainy versions at that since our location near the bottom of a valley blocked good reception from the broadcast towers.

Getting to enjoy crisp digital HD on my 73 incher instead of a snowy picture on a 25 inch genuine wood grain console unit is another large improvement from my tv viewing experience 30 years ago.