matthearn.com

In which Comcast does me a solid:

Saturday morning, Sarah and I were packing for a short overnight trip, and cleaning the house a bit, and watching a bit of TV. Every so often, the DVR cable box would blip off and immediately turn back on, which was annoying; we didn’t really think anything of it, because our house was wired by dyslexic trolls with SEVERE dementia, and we have short power outages at least once or twice a month. It didn’t occur to us at the time that the only thing seeming to suffer on Saturday was the cable box; nothing else in the house was even flickering.

When we returned on Sunday afternoon, the box was simply off. This was odd; we leave it on at all times so that it might record the New Yankee Workshop and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc. It wouldn’t respond to commands from the remote for love nor money, so I unplugged and plugged it back in. The little channel readout on the front flickered “8888” for a few minutes, and then went dark. This did not seem promising.

Monday morning, bright and early, I called Comcast and said “Hey. My DVR doodad appears to have asploded. Please fetch forth another one, forthwith.”

“Is it flashing all 8s on the front?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Yep, the box is fried. We’ll schedule a guy to come out . . . can you be there tomorrow?”

Service within a business day? “Heck yes! What time?”

“He’ll be there between 1pm and 5pm.”

“Then so will I! Thanks!”

Yesterday, I bolted from work and headed home. The repair guy, a tall gentleman named Paul, arrived at 3, brought the new box in, and just as a matter of policy, tested the signal strength on the cable.

“Wow . . . that’s really weak. Did it give you any problems before?”

“Not really. I mean, the occasional digital flicker, but nothing that really angered my humours.”

“Where’s the cable come from?”

I led Paul downstairs to the basement, tiptoed across a floor littered with cat excrement (I hate cats), and showed him where I had put a splitter in the cable to run a line up into the living room.

“Okay, where does it come from to get here?” he asked, so I led him back into the dank depths of my basement, where yet another splitter sent cabling off to the cable modem.

“It comes in to the house here?” he asked.

“Well, yes, but it splits once outside and sends connections into the family room and upstairs to our bedroom.”

“So it splits three times before it even gets to the digital box?”

“Um, yes. I realize that’s probably not good, but most of the cable connections here were installed by drunk and blind Brazilians, I think. There’s not much I can do.”

Paul thought for a moment. “Let me, um, see what I can do.”

With that, he launched into a flurry of cable stripping and splitter replacing, which took about 30 minutes. Then he went upstairs to the living room, plugged his tester into the cable line again, and reported that the signal was still awfully weak, but it was at least a little better. Then he plugged the new DVR cable box in and ran it through its paces. Everything was just fine. I offered to let him sleep with my wife, but he declined. (Paul was a classy guy. Didn’t want to nail my wife, didn’t complain about the filth in my basement, and didn’t even mind when one of the cats tried to feast on his foot.)

And the clincher: the new DVR, a more advanced model, needs a different remote than the one we had. Paul was even more disappointed than I was that he didn’t have a spare remote in his truck, but at some point that evening while Sarah and I were test-driving cars and eating pasta, he came BACK to the house and dropped off a new remote. I don’t think I’ve had service that good since the Happy Ending massage club in Taiwan.