I've had an interesting week when it comes to my TV. On Friday, the construction crew working on that building outside my balcony built another floor. Turns out that it blocks my Direct TV dish. It's perfectly aligned, brilliant really. Since my building only allows you to install a dish on your balcony, not the roof, I no longer have Direct TV service.
Joy.
So I make a call to Time Warner Cable, which just happens to be the only cable company offering service in LA since they bought out Comcast and Adelphia in August. You have to love it when a utility company doesn't have competition, the service gets so good!
Since I already have Comcast Time Warner cable for my internet it was pretty easy to add new service. The tricky part was getting them to give me two Cable Cards, not two cable boxes which they were so kind to tell me I must have in order to get all their great PPV offerings. Great, but I want Cable Cards, and yes, it does in fact work with HBO and HD.
An appointment was made for Tuesday between 10 and 12. At 11:58 on Tuesday the installer shows up. He has never installed cable cards before and it took me a while to explain that they do, in fact, go in the TiVo*.
Before he puts them in, he hits the power switch on my surge protector. With everything being on.
Joy.
Once the cards are in, he calls in the numbers to activate them. He does a quick scan of the channels and promptly leaves. When he's gone, I start to enter my favorite shows, blah blah, and I notice that I'm getting grey screens for almost all the channels.
I place a call to Time Warner support and they inform me that there is an outage in my area. I try to explain that I'm getting all the basic channels and I'm getting internet, but I'm informed that it's just an outage. At this point I really need to go back to work, so I give up.
Joy.
When I get home, I call again. This time I'm informed that it is something wrong with my Tivo. I try and explain that the Tivo is fine. That the real problem is that the cable cards were not activated. That's why I get all the basic channels but none of the encrypted digital channels. Heck, it even says so on the Cable Card menu. No luck. So I get off the phone and call again. This time the person agrees that the problem is not with the Tivo, but insists that they need to send a technician out to activate the cards. No matter how hard I try and can't seem to convince them that, no, cable cards are activated from the office, not the home. An appointment is made for Friday.
Joy.
I thought about waiting till Friday, but I just couldn't do it. I caved and called again. This time I got a technician who actually knew what a cable card is. He also knew that something was wrong on their end. Ten minutes later, my Tivo was getting all the channels in HD glory, including HBO.
Actual Joy.
*On Sunday I went out and bought a Tivo Series 3 because there was no way in hell I was using that piece of shit Motorola DVR again. I love it.
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