On Saturday, I cancelled my DirecTV subscription. On Sunday, I got a call from a gent who works in their "How Do We Get You Back?" department, addressing me like I was a lost lover who'd inexplicably walked out on them after, in this case, almost twenty years. "Was it something I said? Something I did?" He offered all manner of inducements including new DVRs and a lower rate. For a moment there, I thought he was going to offer to send the DirecTV staff hooker over to engage in a little pre-paid pay-per-view. If you know what I mean and I think you do.
I don't believe it would have made a difference if he'd offered me these things two weeks ago but they weren't going to lure me home after I'd bought a new-model TiVo, paid for lifetime service on it, had Time-Warner Cable installed and began ripping out both of my DirecTV satellite dishes and all their wiring. Oh, take a look: This is my new TiVo…
Over the last few weeks, I talked to quite a few folks at DirecTV trying to solve the problem that drove me away, the one I wrote about here. I said to every one of them, "I'm going to have to cancel my service," but it wasn't until I'd taken a hike that this guy came after me. And by then, it was too late.
So now we come to my problems with Time-Warner Cable and I'm hoping this is the last time I'll be writing on this topic. They did their installation on Saturday. The lady who took my order on the phone last week didn't understand what I wanted so the installer showed up without the right equipment. He made a call and was soon joined by a supervisor who brought what was needed and together, they got me up and running…I thought. I noticed that the "package" I'd ordered did not include a few channels I wanted. I didn't notice that I wasn't getting a number of channels I was supposed to be receiving.
Sunday afternoon, I called up and added their "Choice Tier," a package of thirty more channels, twenty-two of which I'll never watch. The gent on the phone activated it and while he was still on the line, I checked…and I had some of the channels but not all. I had CSpan2 but not CSpan3. In an act of what I fear was antisemitism, I had every religious-oriented channel except Jewish Life TV. (A new riddle I made up in the middle of typing that last sentence: Why is Glenn Beck like my spell checker? Because neither one recognizes antisemitism.)
I began randomly flipping to other channels I was supposed to be receiving in the new package and the others and found many to be missing. One was MeTV. When I told the man it wasn't coming through, he consulted his computer and informed me, "Time-Warner doesn't carry MeTV."
I said, "I have a brochure here your installer gave me yesterday. It says MeTV is Channel 137. It's in your 'Variety Tier.'"
He looked again and told me, "No, I'm afraid you must have an old brochure there or something. I'm going down our channel listing here and I don't see anything called MeTV." Well, that was disappointing and a little annoying. That was one of the channels I really wanted.
The man sent all sorts of reauthorization signals from his end and then assured me, "Your missing channels should all appear in the next hour or two. If they're not there in two hours, call us back."
Two hours later, they weren't there and half of my other channels — including ones I had been receiving — we're gone. I briefly wished I hadn't been so brusque with the DirecTV guy and wondered, "Maybe if I sent flowers —?"
I called Time-Warner Tech Support and they couldn't stop the bleeding from afar and wanted to set up a service call for several days in the future. They can always get an installer to your house to begin service but if it then isn't working right? Well, that can take a while. I told him that wasn't acceptable and I even pulled a smidgen of rank by asking, "I'm the producer of a show that airs on a Time-Warner channel and Time-Warner cable can't fix it so I can watch my own show?" You hate being difficult like that but unfortunately, it often works. It caused him to kick my case over to a higher-tier Tech Support division and they began walking me through other possible remedies: Change this setting, reboot that, change another setting, etc. Finally, he asked me to make sure all the cables between my TiVo and the cable box were secure, especially the USB cable.
I checked and told the higher-tier Tech Support guy, "The USB cable is not secure because it's not there." I'd had two installers here and neither one had plugged in that one cable.
The fellow on the line said, "I can send someone out day after tomorrow with one…unless you have a USB cable around." I told him I only had about ninety of them here. I plugged one of them in place and instantly, all my channels appeared…
…and there on 137, right where I said it was and the guy at Time-Warner said it would never be, I found MeTV. I don't know why this kind of thing still surprises me.