I was going to write this in with the 'Update' post but figured it's worthy of its own as it requires a little history. This involves Xfinity (I'll refer to them as Comcast equally) and the dining room television. We've had them since.. well, ever. When we first got cable television back in the early 80s, it was with a local cable company. That got bought up by a bigger local company. That got bought up by a bigger reginal company. Ect ect... it ended up being Comcast and later Xfinity. My hate for them has grown with each iteration.
Understand, we weren't just any regular customer. Well, sure, we're just any other customer, but we got a lot of services from them. We'd always had a few pay channels (HBO, Cinemax...) and a large selection of other cable channels. Soon after my father passed, as he was always the one that dickered and dealed for the family, I took over dealing with Comcast.
The first thing I did was maximize our use. They were the biggest thing in town when it came to internet. I think our broadband DSL at the time was about 5 megabits and we jumped up to the 20s. And we actually got a deal by adding the phone to the package, so we finally left AT&T.
We had the second highest tier of channels with only the sports package and movie package being left out. At the time I think we had to sign a 2 year contract that locked in the price. This was about... 2008? Somewhere around there.
Between then and a year or so ago, I'd be on top of negotiating with Xfinity. It almost always took adding something or signing a new contract, but we'd get more services for less or equal price. As soon as they could, however, they'd raise their prices and we'd have to start our kabuki dance again. Understand, they wouldn't negotiate until I was not only threatening to drop their service, but actually in the process of dropping it. That meant I'd have to have another service already set up as I didn't want to go without service in case they didn't do their part of the dance right.
Two years ago, I gave up. I told Mom and R that I could set us up on a similar streaming system. We'd get most of the channels we watch but not all of them. We may have to use an antennae, but only for a few channels. I even set us up with a complicated DVR system for the antennae channels. I made it clear that I was sick and tired of Comcast's horrible service and didn't want to do it anymore. And understand, I was doing it FOR them. Even then, I rarely if ever watched live television. I streamed almost everything I watched. The only exception is the exception for anybody... sports. But the live streaming services that we could get all offered ESPN channels and FOX sport channels, so even there I'd be covered.
While they tried the complex and difficult to set up system, neither liked it. They could get what they wanted, but it wasn't what they were used to so they wanted to go back. I held my ground and told them they'd have to deal with Comcast then (we hadn't canceled the service yet) as I just wasn't going to call them again outside of canceling the service.
Just a simple example of why I hate them. IF I were to cancel their TV service, I'd still want to keep the internet as there just isn't any other viable option. AT&T now has DSL speeds up to 25 megabit, but we're right now coasting on 500 megabit internet. Those are for similar prices... I assume. You see, I can't get a price out of Comcast. Not on their website or by calling their sales department. To get a price, I'd literally have to cancel the cable TV and landline phone. We could easily drop down to 300 megabit, but I don't even know if that's an option. If it was, I don't know if it's $50 a month or $150 a month.
I HATE Comcast.
So, for the past couple years Mom has managed Comcast. Which means she hasn't done anything. The bill has gone up more and more and now sits at $260 a month. Not baaaaadd, but not good either. She's asked if I'd call them, but I told her no. It's one of the few things I'll put my foot down on. It takes to much effort for to little gain. Sure, she's save some cabbage each month but we'd be supporting a bullshit company which I don't want to do. And understand, I kick in for the bill. $100 a month. I'd say she's doing just fine without me getting the bill down.
Anyway, for the past few weeks we've had a problem with the dining room TV. When it's turned on there is no sound. It can take up to 45 minutes if it's just left on to get the sound to work. If you turn it off, then it goes away again.
The TV isn't all that old. We bought it in Autumn of 2018 and it's a decent Roku TV. At the time I was trying to get mom streaming, but she never did. When she asked me to look into it, I started with the standard hardware elimination game. First I went through the options of both the TV and the cable box and couldn't find anything there. I then removed the cable box from the HDMI 1 input and put it into HDMI 2. No dice. I removed the actual coax cable connection from the cable box and re-attached it. Nope. I then did a hardware reset of both the TV and the cable box. Nothing.
Just the cable sound goes away. If we go into the Roku menu or any of the other Roku channels (Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max...) it also sounds just fine. So at this point I'm happy to just call it the cable box. I went through Comcast's online trouble shooter, but most of it were things we've already tried, so when it gets to the end it asks to join an online chat with a tech.... and then promptly says you can't do that because they're too busy. Understand, this isn't waiting on a phoneline, it's waiting for a tech in a chat box. The only other option was to schedule a call from them. That seemed reasonable, even if it was going to be the next day, so I clicked that and... nope. Too busy. They won't call us back. The only other option is to call them and someone else can take over from there because fuck Comcast. Well, neither of my brothers would step up, so Mom called later that night.
She was of course talking to someone who only spoke broken English and at one point told the tech that she'd already reset the box. I could tell from her reaction that the tech had remotely reset our box. If you don't have Comcast then you probably don't know, but the reset process takes about 12 minutes. Mom just had to sit there on the phone while it went through this process. And of COURSE it didn't fix it. The tech said the next step was to send out a tech that might find a problem in the wiring. Mom actually had to verbally corner this tech on the phone to say that the tech coming to our house would test the box and if it was the box, would have one on them to switch it out. They agreed that they would. They then set up the appointment for the next day, Friday, between 1300 and 1500.
Now, to make sure any of us could call Comcast and not have to go through a whole verification process to prove that Mom was letting me speak on her behalf, both my brother R and I are on the account. We both have our cell phones so we can get texts, but we've listed the home phone as the primary means of contact. We also listed mom's email address as the primary means of email. Only texts should go to my brother and I.
Well, when they confirmed the appointment it was via a text and email to me and it was confiming an appointment from 1500 to 1700 on the following Monday. God damned mother fucking Comcast! I was able to reschedule, but only to Saturday. Understand, we have a Xfinity store here in town. We can take the box down there and exchange it out Easy Peesy Lemon Squeezy. But nope, the tech has to come out and check out our wiring.
The tech calls that morning and says they finished up some work faster than they thought and if we were interested, they could come by in 20 minutes. This was at 1100. Fine. Get them here as fast as possible. The tech was fine... but he was arrogant as all hell. I explained (of course it was me, because who else would step up and help out!?) all the steps we've done and the specific problem. His first step was to nod and change the connection from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2.
And the sound came back on.
He was full of himself and started saying that somtimes it was how hard you put the cable in and you had to have just the right touch and.... while he was talking I turned the TV and cable box off and turned it back on to no sound.
He changed the HDMI cable and got the sound back. I turned the TV off and on and lost it again. He checked the whole house wiring (which by the way, if they find a problem there then we have to pay for the repair!) and couldn't find anything wrong. So he admitted he had to change the box out. But (of course there's a but, it's Comcast after all) he didn't have one of those boxes on hand.
He did take the time to call the other techs to see if anybody had one that he could go get, but none of them had one either. He could now order one and it would be here in a couple days, or he could upgrade us to the "new" Xfinity X1 system.
Umm... that's what we already have. In fact, we got the damned box when we upgraded to Xfinity X1 in 2014. That of course changed everything and he could get us a new box right away.
The new box didn't fix the god damned problem.
So, he started over. He switched it to HDMI 3 and it worked. I turned off the TV and turned it back on and... yeah, the sound was there. He said it was rare for a TV to lose two HDMI ports at once, but it's obviously what happened. His smug ass thanked us and left after pointing out that we at least got a new box out of the deal and wouldn't be charged anything.
Two hours later the sound went out.
Now, after all he's done and all we've done, and especially all we've replaced, I can say for certain that it's the TV. I don't believe it's the actual ports failing though. I think it's the processor and it's not accepting any input. I bet if we hooked it up to the old red/white/yellow cables or an old optical sound cable it would fail in the same way. We just need a new TV. And since mom doesn't use the Roku part, we can ditch them (they only come on cheap nasty TVs) and get an actual nice one. It doesn't need to be 4K because very little of the stuff we get on Xfinity comes in 4K. The same with UHD. Understand, for quality TV/movie/streaming viewing we have the big 4K OLED HDR tv in the living room. The one in the dining room will play 90% CNN and MSNBC with the rest being non 4K programing.
My brother R immediately looked on New Egg and I started looking at Best Buy. Best Buy didn't have anything in stock while New Egg had a lot of options. The biggest, baddest, most expensive TV though is under $300. That's chump change. But it points out where mom makes a difference.
She's cheap. Now, in a lot of ways, this serves her and us. She still does the grocery shopping even if it's all carted out to her car. She looks around and gets stuff when its on sale, buys a lot of meat when it's on a good sale and freezes it, gets a shit ton of canned goods when it's on a good sale... she saves money. But whenever we have the chance to buy something 'nice' she balks at it. I had to fight her tooth and nail to get her two different cars. Her van was okay (it wasn't). Her little Calibur was okay (it wasn't serving her needs). I looked at it in a completely different way... I have the money so why not spend it on the nicest thing I can buy?
So mom wanted to get a $75 cheapy TV she found at Sam's Club. I think it's designed for like an RV or something as it would be smaller than the TV we already have. I should puase and mention we have very limited space for this TV. It's currently a 28 inch and doesn't have much room for more. Anyway, hers would actually take it back down to 24 inches. It was HD, but only 720. And it wasn't a smart TV at all. But hey, it was only $75!
R's and my TV selections were both over $200. And again, we had to fight her for it. First we had to fight for the TV, then we had to fight for the right (to party?) to pay for it ourselves. At the end of the day, we won out, but I feel like I beat my mom physically and she's hurt by losing. I just don't get it.
By the way, speaking of Mom's cars, she (I) owes $10,000 more on it but it's worth according to Kelly Blue Book is $16,000. She's $6,000 in the green! Nina, on the other hand is $9,000 in the red. That's not bad though, as the last time I looked it up she was $12,000 in the red. AND that $9,000 includes the $6,000 I lost on Isabella and the warranty. So, not bad! I might break even on Nina in a year or two. I don't think I'll look at trading her in so early, but it would be nice to actually have value in a car for the first time... um... ever!
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