Kill your television...

With Lilek's constant griping about DirectTV I'd like to point out that cable isn't much better.

It should have been fairly simple - my roomate moved out, and so he had to get his cable cancelled and service started in my name. While I was at it, my landlord wanted to get the cable rewired in black, and installed properly. I live in a hundred-something year old brownstone with windows over all the doors inside. When the last cable guy was there, he wired between the doorframe and window with white cable. Personally, I could care less, but my landlord actually has taste, unlike me, a guy who uses one of those tables from Staples as a desk.

I mentioned this to the cable people, they said OK. Cable guy gets there at 3:30, says no, spends half an hour talking to his boss, followed by his boss's boss. They say it would cost $75 to remove the old cable and $25 to put new cable. He offers to run it over the doors for free.

Between hooking it up, running the line, ect, it takes a couple hours. Gets my floormate's working, can't get mine working. Tries swapping cable boxes. Realizes there is no signal from the cable, and reruns all the cable from the living room to my room. Plugs in the cable box. By now, it's around 8pm.

He finally calls into the cable company to give them the cable box serials. One isn't in the system, so he has to swap that out again. Finally leaves, 4 hours later.

Five minutes after he rolls out, my landlord lets me know that the bottom floor doesn't have cable. I curse, call the number the cable guy gave me, get a voice answering in Spanish. He puts me on hold, and about a minute later my cell drops out. Call back, finally get someone in English, give him the info, he tells me he'll call back.

Almost two hours later, there's a knock at my door. Cable guy actually came back at like 11pm. He goes out back, hooks the other tap off the pole back up, and all is well.

Except I still have to get my reciever, RePlay, TV, and cable box to play nice together. So far I can get sound and video, but I can't change the channel, and I can't program the RePlay. I'm hoping it's a simple matter of switching cables, but at that time last night I didn't want to deal with it.

Unfortunatly, the roomate whose moving out is the AV expert, so I can't even easily ask him for help.