Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Suckage Known as Comcast
Oh, Comcast, how I love to hate thee.
I had my new service installed last week, and the installer called me to say he was going to be a few minutes late. I appreciated that. He ran the cables and did great. He told me that the office was unable to “flip” my cable box to run the TiVo software because my account was locked. He said that he’s heard of this happening to TiVo installations but it’s never happened to him since this was his first TiVo installation.
That night, I attempted to do the “self install” of my cable modem, and that was ridiculous. After talking to a clueless customer service rep, we finally got it working, including two reboots of my Mac. That’s right, he had me reboot a Mac. I don’t ever reboot my Mac, Comcast support made me do it twice. I think he was just killing time.
Sunday, my TiVo service stopped working. So I went through the TiVo menus and restarted the system. My cable box became a brick at that moment. It tried to restart with no success. After an hour of trying to power cycling it, I gave up and called Comcast support. After an hour of being on hold, I went online and got a support tech via Comcast’s website. She suggested I schedule a service call. Well, as soon as she said that, the TiVo service launched. Obviously, whatever she was doing to troubleshoot my problem did something to get the ball rolling again.
It appears that I’m not the only person having this problem. (link) If I were in a position to do so, I’d replace my current TiVo with the HD version and just get the cable cards. I’d say that the TiVo service from Comcast just isn’t ready for prime time yet.