Mapquest

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to connect a friggin‘ cable box. Why is that when you want to get a brand new cable subscription they want a cable guy to come to your house and hook it up for you? The installation charges, $9.95, were minimal and didn’t bother me. What I find ridiculous is that they shouldn’t make it mandatory that someone comes to your home. It should be a service that’s offered if you’re a total doofus when it comes to anything even remotely technical. I thought they had self install kits but after asking about it, they claim they only offer that for High Speed Internet and not cable.
When you schedule the cable guy to come to your home they’re nice enough to give you a window of time that he’s supposed to come. That estimate is about as accurate as saying “Well sir, he possibly might come at some point during the day.” “He’ll be there between 1 and 3 PM” said the woman on the other end of the phone at Comcast. As the time neared 2:30 I was on the phone in no time asking where this motherf’er is. I had to be in my condo at 1 and stay until 3, and when it was 3 he was nowhere to be found. I get a call at around 3:30 from the cable guy who will be coming. He’s completely lost and he barely speaks English. I gathered from my keen observation skills that he was asking me to help him get to my condo so I needed to stay on the phone. Well wasn’t he a little lost, pushy bastard! There I was waiting in the empty condo trying to explain to this guy who had marbles in his mouth how to get to my condo from a neighboring town less than 2 miles away. As I clearly explained what route to take he still asked me to stay on the phone with him. Shouldn’t DIRECTIONS be something that these guys leave their building with? Perhaps a brain might come in handy as well. How are these guys going to get their jobs done without a Mapquest printout or a freakin‘ GPS system in their truck? What if they send Fedex guys out to drop off packages without giving them the addresses of the places they need to go?
The guy finally gets to the condo at 4:30 pm and obviously goes to the wrong building as I stand in my window and throw my forehead into my hand in disgust. I call him to tell him he’s going into the wrong building. (Numbers are blatantly marked on the windows of the building lobbies.) Once he comes in he hands me the cable box and asks ME if I knew how to hook it up! I felt like telling him, we could have avoided this mess if they would have just let me do it on my own. That’s why I asked if I could do it on my own to begin with. After he basically asked if I could do his job for him and still pay Comcast $9.95, I began hooking it up in mere seconds while he went outside to make sure the switch to my unit was turned on. When he came back he asked me if I had a drink for him. I said “Sure what would you like, I have soda, water, iced tea?”” He asked if I had Sprite. Well aren’t we picky now! He should have been thankful that I was so agreeable with his request. I said “I have Mountain Dew.” He said he wanted that and he gulped it down like his body depended on this dew to keep him alive. What’s wrong with these guys? They have no drinks for them either? A vending machine? Once he started on the internet he had to call in my mac address because I have my own modem. His call on his cell phone kept dropping and he had to keep calling back in. (He called back in 3 times because every time he read the mac address she couldn’t hear it.)
And the moral of the story: I was impatient. If I had waited just a few days after this fiasco I saw a Comcast commercial on TV advertising their latest promotion: Cable self install kits. FUUUCK!