Cable Company Shuffle

Remember those books that gave you different endings? You would read the beginning of the story, and then, at some point, it would say, "If you think little Tommy should go into the woods after his dog, go to page 54; if you think he should chase after the frog, go to page 27." Well, that is sort of how I felt yesterday with our cable company's customer service reps. Between Mitch and I, we had four telephone conversations, each of them so varied in the response to, "Our DVR that you just installed doesn't record," that I just HAD to share.

Telephone conversation #1:
Mitch called and told them the DVR doesn't work. He asked if the service guy could come back out. The rep told him that the service guy would call him back. Mitch waited for a couple of hours and no one called back and no one showed up. (We found out later that they scheduled for the service guy to come back out on Monday between 8 and 10, but no one bothered to call Mitch and inform him of this.)

Telephone conversation #2:
Mitch was sick of dealing with them. So, I decided to call while I was still at work. The service rep refused to speak to me because my name was not on the account. I told her that I was Mitchell's wife and could give her our account number. I also told her that I was the one that set up the service guy to come out to the house in the first place. She began to LECTURE ME on customer service ethics. I was polite and hung up on her. And I mean that. If I had kept talking to her, curse words would have been involved. I knew the most polite thing to do was to hang up.

Telephone conversation #3:
I called again while I was on my commute home. This time, the fact that my name wasn't on the account was not an issue. This rep sounded half way intelligent. I told her our problem, she put me on hold to talk to the tech guys. She came back and said that it looks like when the service guy was at the house and set up the DVR box, he forgot to enter the serial number of the box into the computer. Therefore, the box wasn't being recognized. She told me that when I got home, to call back and give the service rep our serial number and our problems should be solved. I asked her if there was any way I could get her again, and she said no.

Telephone conversation #4:
I called back with the serial number in my hand. When I explained to the service rep that came on the line about the serial number, there was this long pause. She asked for the serial number. Then she said that the serial number is already in the computer. She put me on hold to talk to a tech guy again. She came back and told me that it looks like when the cable company received this DVR box from the manufacturer, they didn't put it in the computer as a DVR box. They entered it as a regular cable box. That is why it wasn't recording. She told me another service guy would come out next week to give us another box, and they would waive our first month of DVR service. Mitch got on the line at this point and said that wasn't good enough. So, they gave us free On-Demand movies for a month as well.

OK, so let's recap, shall we? The responses we got to, "Our DVR doesn't work," were as follows:
"Someone will call you back [as I secretly enter a service call appointment the you won't know about]."
"I can't talk to you becuase you are not Mitchell."
"The serial number isn't in the computer."
"The serial number is in the computer, but the DVR box is defecteive"

If you think we should do a dance around the DVR box to get it to work, go to page 25; if you think we should throw the DVR box through the window and hit the service guy in the head, go to page 67.