Congratulations Comcast, you came through and supplied me with the product (cable box) you should’ve given me in the first place. It looks good, no more scrolling purple lines, the box doesn’t look like it’s older than my son… awesome.
A few things to mention though… you don’t have to call 6 fucking times to confirm the appointment. Just once is sufficient, I’m not going to change my mind about needing the service call.
“Hello Mr. (my last name tee hee!) this is Comcast calling to confirm that you still need a service call!”
“Yeah…..”
The second to last call from them was to inform me that they’d need to reschedule due to the tech’s van “breaking down.” So they asked if it would be ok if they came between 11 and 2, instead of the original 8 to 11. No problem! I understand some work van trouble, I’ve had it myself. Of course when the dude shows up, I see the bright shiny red gas can in the back of the van. Apparently “broke down” and “didn’t fill up the gas tank” are synonymous.
Anyway, thanks to them! Now I can see HD tv’s without the annoying scrolling purply lines. Apparently bitching anonymously on the internet can yield positive results.
Posted on: February 13th, 2009
I told Brian Austin Greene that I’d put this picture up.
Downtown Atlanta, across the street from Piedmont Park.
Hello “friends”! I noticed those fucks on The Geekshow Podcast mentioned my fucking thing… so… WELCOME NEW READERS!!!
It’s been a minute since last I updated this what-have-you, blog fucking thing. It’s because I’m incredibly uninteresting and I rarely ever allow anything interesting to happen to me. Sometimes, however, I can’t avoid being thrust into some shit that merits being typed about here.
It’s that time of year where our (the U.S. of A) government, returns just a little bit of the money they stole from us throughout the preceding year. It’s my favorite time of the year, as it’s when I get to get a little zany and pick up some expensive-ass shit.
This year we (that’s my wife and I) decided it was finally time to get out of the fucking mid-nineties and get a proper television. The one we were using had been in my family for at least a decade… possibly slightly less. This fucking thing is a beast of a TV, 25 inches of convex tube horror. The Xbox we recently got looked like moldy dog shit on it, the picture was all chopped off on the edges and you couldn’t read a fucking thing on it because the text was too goddamned small. SO! We hunted down a new television! A better television! Finally in the year 2009 I can afford a fucking LCD tv, these bitches have really come down in price!
There’s a chain of stores here in the southeast that has excellent deals on a lot of brand name electronics, most notable is the huge selection of LCD and plasma televisions that take up the majority of the store. We went there the weekend before we were scheduled to receive our tax refund, and looked at what they had available to aid in figuring out which we would get.
(This is a ridiculously convoluted story to get to hating Comcast)
The new TV. Complete with Spongebob, Mr. Krabbs and a painting by me.
We found the one we wanted, a 42″ 1080p Sharp LCD with a sticker price of $698!! Quite a fucking deal right? Right! So! We got the tax refund a few days earlier than we thought we would, so my lovely wife went to get the TV while I was at work, lo and behold… the price has dropped to $598! Wow! But alas, none in stock… but wait! A floor model! At a discount you say?! Sold! We ended up with the TV we wanted for 200 less dollars than we thought we’d be paying. It’s a nice fucking television, although it isn’t difficult to be better than the piece of shit we were using.
Well now… we’ve got an HD capable TV… what about our cable? Comcast offers HD, just have to get an HD box don’t we? Welly welly welly well, let me just get that set up right away! Oh but wait, they want to send out a technician to install it (as if I can’t plug in a fucking cable box), oh and they can’t come out for over a week? That’s pretty fucking retarded. That isn’t what this is about though…
The dude shows up with this very clearly used, old-as-a-really-old-fucking-thing of a box and starts setting it up. When I say “starts setting it up” I mean he set it on my TV bench and I plugged everything in because I didn’t want him fucking anything up. He turned on the TV and switched the channel to ESPNHD, this is when I discovered what has got to be one of the top 5 most annoying sounds in the world… FUCKING SQUEAKY BASKETBALL SHOES. I don’t know how anyone can play basketball or watch basketball with all of that motherfucking squeaking going on, cable guy had that shit on for a solid 10 minutes (seriously, it doesn’t take that long to hook it up) SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK *score* SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK. Fucking maddening, this is still not the reason I say Comcast are motherfuckers.
I think they guy might have ascertained that I was thoroughly annoyed by the basketball he had put on, so he changed the channel and informed me he was waiting for the box to finish acquiring the guide and he was waiting for On Demand to start working. Meanwhile, on the channel he changed it to there are these transparent purple-ish bars that are scrolling up the screen, which he points out and says:
“You see these lines, it’s these cheap component cables. I recommend an HDMI cable (he pronounced the H thus – HATE-CH)”
“Oh, I’ve got one of those, I’ll switch it out… no problem”
At this point he decided that he was tired of waiting on his dispatcher to tell him if the On Demand portion of our cable is working properly or not, and that if there are any problems he’ll be sure to call me up and walk me through it.
As soon as he leaves I lean over and look at the back of the “new” cable box and notice… no fucking HDMI port on the goddamned thing. Now I’ve got fucking scrolling purple lines on all of the HD channels and no goddamned way to make it any fucking better, and the motherfucking useless ass technician didn’t bother to fucking tell me that although he recommends using an HDMI cable to attach the fucking box to my fucking TV… there’s not a way to fucking do it with the goddamned 5 year old piece of shit cable box he’s just attached to my TV.
I called Comcast yesterday (Monday) and requested the updated box they have with the HDMI and component connections, the lady on the phone told me “no problem just take it to your local Comcast store and they’ll swap it out.”
“Far out” I thought, and we packed it up and headed over to our local branch… just to find out they don’t open on Mondays.
Fuck you installer, fuck you lady on the phone. Fuck you Comcast for knowingly installing sub-standard cable boxes and fucking sub-standard component cables. What the fuck do I pay you so much money every month for?
The Xbox looks damned good on it though! Watcho!
