Sunday, November 16, 2008


At least once a week since August, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some quality time with my cable company. You know. The guys who provide me with TV and internet and phone service. They set up appointments. They either come to their scheduled appointments, or I spend 40 minutes on the phone with staff who claim that I canceled the appointment or I wasn’t here or that the appointment was at a different time. Sometimes the appointments are during work time. Other appointments are on weekend days, and I sit around the house rather than grocery shopping or taking Liana to the zoo or the museum. Other times, I get to have very long phone conversations, sometimes with human beings, and other times with recorded messages telling me to crawl around on my floor and unplug things and frequently saying things like “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand you. Can you just tell me if you see the four green lights?”

The months of August, September and October were spent with Time Warner Cable. Five cable boxes later, after a long bout with no internet or telephone, after having missed two of the three presidential debates, I had a tantrum and switched to RCN Cable. They, of course, promised me the world. Three hour time slots for appointments. Evening schedules. And even after the promotional specials expire, the service will still be cheaper than Time Warner.

The initial installation was uneventful for the TV and internet. And the internet has been going down less frequently, so I’m delighted. I seem to have more channels with stuff that Liana likes, which is great. But sadly, we do not have Noggin on Demand, which means that we cannot watch Miss Spider or Little Bear at any hour of the day or night.

The phone was another story. They couldn’t get the phone connected during the initial installation because they needed to get into some room in the basement and it was late in the evening and the basement room was locked. The guy asked me when I wanted him to come back, and gave me a bunch of options. I picked Sunday from 8-11 AM. When I called RCN last Sunday at about 10:45, the woman on the other end of the phone assured me that it was not a three hour time slot, but in fact an ALL DAY appointment. I told her that was not acceptable, and that I had a brunch date. No one called. No one came back. Later in the week I called them up, and said that I’d been spending entirely too much time dealing with cable companies, and that under no circumstances was I going to EVER be available for an ALL DAY appointment, and that they could just cancel my phone service, which had yet to be turned on.

A nice woman fussed and coo’ed and promised that someone would be here this Sunday. Today.

And the guy came. At 8:30! Which was great. However, he ran around looking for my phone jack, which I don’t have because I’ve never had a landline here except for the Time Warner connection. So he said he couldn’t do it. But that someone else could come later today. In an hour.

We’ll see.
I suppose I could entertain myself straightening up the apartment a bit, huh?