Musing: Comcast Sux

I've been away from my blog for so long! I went out of town a couple weeks back, which caused me to get completely out of touch with all of my online activities, and when I got back I just... never really got back into them. Does this ever happen to you? It's funny how you get so in the habit of looking at the same websites, writing on the same blogs and boards and reading the same solicitations for penis enlargement that it all just becomes part of one big daily routine. Then when something breaks the routine, it's actually pretty refreshing to just get away from it all. So aside from checking in on my Scrabulous games, I've been offline for most of the last couple weeks. But then something happens to jump start the routine again. For me, that something was Comcast.

The entire time I've had my Comcast DVR set-top box, it's been malfunctioning. It started by freezing up pretty much every time it had to receive new information, which was about every 15 minutes. I'd hit the buttons on the remote, and it would just sit there for several seconds--sometimes as long as a minute--before spewing all my commands out at once. Then, it started jacking up my recordings. If I tried to record something--ANYthing--on HBO HD, it would come out unplayable. The sound dropped out of a lot of recordings and you could occasionally get it back by rewinding. Sometimes this would happen over and over again. Most recently, it'd begun to get really pissy for a few hours at a time. It would digitize the picture ("tile" in Comcast lingo) every few seconds and the sound would drop out.

A screenshot of George's inner life.

This was pretty much the last straw--finally enough to make me forsake all my recordings and series recording setups and take it in for a new one. [This is a pretty craptacular experience in and of itself. See my Yelp! review for the details about my inner thoughts during this episode, which include musings about hand grenades.] Here follows the only good news of this entire, ongoing Comcast ordeal: they have a new model of set-top box, and it's prettier. Unfortunately, the only problem it solves is the whole freeze-up situation. I'm still getting the pissy "tiling" issue. So I call in a service appointment and miss work this morning. The guy is late. So I miss work this afternoon. The results: to make a long story short, I have another appointment scheduled for tomorrow. Luckily, Marissa will be around to meet the guy this time--I do still have a job.

But the lighter side of this whole experience is that I found myself sitting on the couch for several hours with nothing to do. (Life pretty much sucks when you're at home with nothing to do and just turning on the TV is enough to make your blood pressure skyrocket.) So I managed to compose a whopping NINE (9) Yelp! reviews and began missing writing in my blog.