The Narrative of Kurt & Becky

Before I post the Paris leg of our vacation, I wanted to take a little break and mention a still-ongoing adventure my wife and I are currently going through.

As many of you know, I recently graduated from university. After we came back from our vacation, we decided that it was time for us to finally subscribe to in-home television service. Up to this point, if either of us wanted to watch TV, we would go over to Sharon’s (Becky’s mother) house. Even better, since Sharon has a TiVo, we would go over to her house, set up the shows we wanted to watch, and come back later in the week to watch them.

But now that we’ve both got some free time, we wanted to watch TV in our own home. So I first investigated Verizon. We had Verizon for our telephone and DSL service, so it would be nice to get it all on one bill. We had also been receiving non-stop communication (phone calls, letters, salesmen knocking on our door) advertising Verizon’s new fiber optic serive, FiOS. I looked at the Verizon FiOS website, and it informed me that we qualify for both internet and television service. Super! I called a set up an appointment, which I scheduled for a week or so in the future. They gave me a time window of 08:00 to 17:00. Nice. So I arranged to take the entire day off from work. At about 10:00 the Verizon technician knocked on our door. He told me that our home wasn’t qualified for FiOS, the lines hadn’t been run yet. I told him that the website to me that we qualified. The technician apologized and said there’s nothing he can do, the lines simply aren’t run, and he left.

That put us both out for two reasons. We still can’t watch television, and why would Verizon bombard us with advertisements about something we can’t even get? So, that night we decided to go with Time Warner Cable for internet, TV, and telephone service to boot. We scheduled an appointment for about a week in the future.

Yesterday (12 July) was the appointment date. This time the time window was a refreshing 15:00 to 17:00. I took off work a little early, and the technician arrived a bit after 15:00. He looked around, pointed to the TV and said, “I assuming you want the DVR over there and,” He pointed to the computer, “the modem there?” I affirmed, and he said, “Ok, let me get my tools.” He went down to his truck, got an impressive-looking tool belt and looked around the walls for a cable outlet. He didn’t find one. He went outside to find where the cable initially comes into the building. About ten minutes later, he comes back and tells me that he can see the cable coming into our building and going up to our unit, but can’t find where it comes out in our space. He looked around the interior some more, then went outside to call his supervisor. After the call he told me that his supervisor was on his way. He went back outside to check again on the line. When he came back he told me that his supervisor wasn’t going to come after all and we need to call our property manager to see if they know where the cable line comes out. If they don’t he needs their permission in writing to run the cable externally. Then he left.

Once again, I took off work and was left with no television service.

Once Becky got home we called the property manager who told us they needed to contact our agent and would give us a call back. Then we called Time Warner and complained about the unfinished job. We’ve got another appointment for next Saturday. At least I don’t need to take off any more work.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 11:48 and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.