Voenix Rising

Once upon a time I got my internet, cable, and seldom-used land line telephone from one provider. Life was good. Things were simple.

Then we moved to Denver.  My previous provider didn’t have a presence in Colorado, so we went with Comcast for everything. (We actually dumped the land line shortly after getting it because all we were getting were collection calls for whomever had the number before we did and haven’t regretted that decision one bit.)

Service with Comcast is okay—as long as you don’t want to make any sort of change once you’re set up. Then it becomes a trip through the seven levels of customer service hell; something we discovered about a year ago when we  switched from our reliable cable card-Tivo setup to Xfinity’s native DVR and—having realized what a horrific mistake that was— switched back.

Ben’s mom, a newly minted Comcast employee nine months ago, took over our account in order to get basically free service. It was a nice perk, but we thought that when she moved out we’d just take her off the account and everything would go back the way it was before.

Not so fast, Buckaroo! Comcast informed us that we would have to set up a new account since Julie was now the account holder. In addition, they would have to send a technician out to  put a new cable card in the Tivo (a $70 charge, and no we couldn’t simply go to a Comcast store and pick one up ourselves) because the existing card couldn’t be switched over.

Not wholly unexpected, especially since that woman has destroyed so many other things since her arrival here. But still…

Fuck that.

The one thing I feared the most was losing my Comcast email address because it was tied to pretty much everything, but I bit the bullet last week and moved it all over to my iCloud address. Yes, it was a major pain in the ass, but since it was obvious I was going to lose the Comcast addy, it had to be done. (And now I know why so many people have addresses not tied to a specific service provider.)

I balked at the thought of having to go back to DSL speeds, but with Comcast out of the picture we had no other option. We signed up with Century Link for the 40 Mbps tier. I’m not holding my breath…

Even though I’m now working for one of the “other” content providers and am eligible for basically free television service, I haven’t rushed to get signed up because I was reasonably certain that our west-facing apartment wouldn’t afford the proper line-of-sight needed to the satellite. Our only other choice was my company’s competitor, but after having horrific experience with that company in Phoenix, Ben swore he’d never go back to them.

So I signed up for my free service. The biggest problem we initially faced was that our building was pre-wired for the competitor’s system, and the landlord told us in no uncertain terms we could not use other. Well fuck that too! As it turns out, the FCC has certain rules in place that allow us to do exactly that—as long as it’s not specifically spelled out otherwise in our lease (it isn’t), and we don’t physically attach anything, drill holes, or make changes to the premises. In other words, a dish on a tripod on our balcony running a flat wire under the door to the inside is fine.

Well, the installer came out today and confirmed what I’d suspected. We don’t have a clear line of sight to the satellite without mounting the dish on an extension arm on the balcony railing. That we can’t do.

So that leaves getting our service from my employer’s competitor that has central dishes already mounted on the building. We have no other choice at this point. Hopefully our experience with them will be better than what Ben went through on his own in Phoenix.

And of course we can’t schedule a time when both companies can be here on the same day so that there’s minimal time off work and loss of service. That would be too easy!  We supposedly won’t be without television since that’s getting moved over the day before Julie switches her service on at her new place, but we’ll be without decent internet for the better part of the week, having to rely on cellular LTE tethering.

I know, I know. It’s all first world problems, but fuck! Why can’t this shit be simple?