Skip to main content

Pausing in High Definition

This is a tale of the worst customer service I have ever been witness to. I am the victim in the story. Were it not for my love of On Demand, I would have been on the phone with DirectTV days ago. I'm still considering, but it depends on some things.

All I wanted was High Definition television and a DVR box from my new cable company. Now, for background, I am renting my current house from my mother-in-law, to keep the house for her, while she works a temporary position with her company's training infrastructure. We're trying to keep as much as possible in her name, so that her move back is easier.

Here is the tale, in bullet point:
  • Call and schedule an appointment and backup appointment for HD DVR and a cable modem installation.
  • Miss the first appointment and figure they were busy.
  • Call first thing on the day of the backup, to remove the cable modem from the order. The phone company gave me a discount to keep the DSL, that saved me more than a bundle from the cable company.
  • Find out they never made the appointment. I waited a week for nothing.
  • I ask if I, not being the account holder, can go in and pick up the box. I am told tha I can.
  • Going into the location, I'm told I can't pick up the box, even though I have all the information.
  • My wife is added to the account, and we're told I can pick up the box, being married to an account holder.
  • Second trip is responded to negatively. When I say the 800 number OK'ed my trip, I am told "You don't need to listen to them, you need to listen to me. I have the boxes."
  • My wife goes to the location with a friend.
  • She's told she is not on the account, but that there is a note that her mother called in to add her. Somehow, that was not good enough.
  • "Isn't that good enough," her friend asks.
    "Who is this," the clerk asks, pointing at the friend and not looking away from my wife. "She needs to not talk."
  • On that last point, I shit you not.
  • They take my wife into the back office to tell her she can not get the box. That is strange.
  • When my wife gets home, I call them again and tell them the story, only to have it confirmed that my wife is absolutely on the account. Their HQ contacts the retail location and tells the manager to expect us and have the equipment ready.
  • We go back, pick up the box, and bring it home.
  • They forgot to give us a power cable.
  • We make a fifth trip to get a power cable.
No one would tell me how much storage the box had, so I still don't know how much I can record on the thing.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Why not mention which cable company, so we know who to avoid? I sure hope it's not TWCC.
9:54 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...
Post a Comment
Read more