The cut cable

I mentioned in a Tweet the other day that our DirecTV cable was cut. I delayed blogging about it because I was hoping to get a good picture of the cable when Paul got home from Vermont. But, alas, we turned the cable over to the apartment manager before I had a chance to take a better pic than the one I snapped with my cameraphone.

The still-short-but-not-as-short-as-Twitter version is this: Our DirecTV went out mid-afternoon on Saturday, our fourth outage since mid-September. I called our DTV provider and they scheduled me for a Tuesday service appointment. Fabulous. Four days with no TV, and three of those days with no Paul to keep me amused. That's where Get Smart came in. So far, I've watched 60 of the 138 episodes. I'm so hooked. I could totally be on Jeopardy! if they limited their topics to Get Smart, They Might Be Giants, tea, and the chemistry of drinking water (hey, I did read Paul's dissertation). I might be able to pull off answering clues about old NES games, too, but that's iffy.

I got a call Monday from one of our DTV provider's techs. "Hey, it's Chad." Chad was the tech that came after our third outage. "Look, I'm on my way to your apartment now. I'll be there in 15 minutes."

Normally this would've been fantastic news, but I'd stayed up practically all night watching Season 1, slept in late, and still looked like hell. "You're coming today?" I said, groaning. He laughed and said, "What, did you think I was coming tomorrow?" Gaaaah. "Well, yeah, I actually did," I told him. Then I convinced him to make me the second stop of the afternoon so I could shower and change clothes.

He and his trainee showed up a little while later, checked our receiver and poked around some outside. Then he walked in and handed me a thingamajig with a cut wire on the end. I know he told me what it was, but I was too busy fuming to pay attention. He said sometimes the cable TV guys cut it in hopes of frustrating people until they go back to cable. But if the cable guy cut the wire, that would have meant he was digging in our box at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon. That seemed unlikely to me.

At this point I'll mention how much I hate Charleston Comcast. I have a number of reasons, with the top two being that the channel selection is crummy and the staff members we've dealt with have been fairly incompetent. Case in point: We turned in our cable box mid-September after our DTV was activated. With that, Paul and I washed our hands of Comcast ... but Comcast didn't. In fact, they never shut off our cable and billed us for October and November. Paul called them last week to hash out why the cable hadn't been shut off. He was told they would have to come to our apartment to physically turn off the service.

That conversation popped into my mind yesterday. I put two and two together, called Comcast and told them I needed to check whether they'd finished the deactivation. The customer service rep pulled up my account and said the deactivation listed two dates: Nov. 4 and Nov. 8.

Nov. 4 was when Paul called to complain. Nov. 8 was the day they came here to turn off the service. And that was Saturday, the same day our DTV went out.

I've talked to the apartment manager twice -- via e-mail and in person -- about the whole situation, and I've been careful not to condemn the cable guy outright. Maybe it wasn't intentional, you know? But would it have been so hard to stop by and let us know he'd screwed up? Or even stop by to let us know he'd turned off our Comcast service?

The whole thing gives me a headache. But I'm grateful and thankful it's over now. (Link goes to funny pic on Doc's blog.)

Okay, time to quit yappin'. The Cit's homecoming bonfire is tonight. The women's club is having a potluck in conjunction with that, so I've got to run to the grocery store and buy stuff to bake into a beautiful, tasty creation.

... But one more Get Smart episode first. Priorities, you know.