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March 15, 2005
Some days it's not worth getting out of bed...
Got home this morning at 2:30am and collapsed into bed. DirecTV was supposed to be here between 8 and noon today to install service, and our bedroom furniture was scheduled to be delivered between 9:30 and 10:30.
Got up at 8, took care of a few things, and set to work pulling apart the bedroom to accept the new furniture.
At 9 I called Comcast to see if they had installed cable as promised. They apparently had some big job come up last week that delayed them, so they hope to get out today or tomorrow. I knew I wasn't imagining it when I saw their temporary paint marks still on the ground...
At 10:45 I got a call from the receiving dock at work telling me "I had a bunch of furniture being delivered."
WTF?!?
Apparently he furniture company had screwed up and listed my work address as the delivery address on the order - so our bedroom set is sitting across the bay in Seattle.
The warehouse manager calls me back and says he can probably deliver it on friday the 18th.
As I'm on the phone trying to sort that out, the DirecTV installer arrives and starts to walk the property to find a good install spot.
I call the furniture place and lay it out - I've stayed home today to accept delivery, and got my bedroom pulled apart - and due to their screw up the goods are sitting 10 miles away across the water. The guy commits to calling me back by 12:30 (15 minutes and counting...)
The DirecTV guy knocks on the door and let's me know he needs to talk to me when I'm available. Turns out he's walked all the way around the house looking for a clear shot to the satellite. He can't find one.
If, he says, we want to cut down a bunch of trees, we can probably get line-of-sight to the satellite, but he can't guarantee it.
So I have a (recently upgraded, in case you've forgotten) DirecTivo that's now a 240GB door stop. I've got an ethernet to 802.11g bridge I bought specifically for said TiVo that I no longer need, and a whole boat-load of shows on said TiVo that we can't watch, 'cause it won't boot without talking to the satellite.
I should have just stayed in bed.
Posted by dberger at March 15, 2005 9:59 AM
Comments
Wow. Just wow. You must have really pissed off some higher being recently. 'Cause _damn_.
Posted by: Titus at March 15, 2005 1:26 PM
Could you put the dish up on a mast? You don't have any PITA association out there on the island, I assume...
Posted by: Hendel at March 15, 2005 4:29 PM
A mast? The trees we're talking about are conservitavely 70 feet tall.
If I was happy to lock myself into standard def only I could probably get away with cutting down a handful of trees, but if we want the possibility of high-def, the count almost doubles. (There are three sat's you need to acquire for high-def, only two for standard def.)
On the (small) upside, it turns out the TiVo will let you interrupt it's attempt to acquire sat' signal and watch stuff, so at least we can watch/I can digitally extract the shows we care about.
The furniture is being delivered Friday - and they're comping shipping, and knocking $100 off the bill. A hundred dollars isn't nearly enough to compensate me for having to move the existing bedroom furniture twice - so I made sure the store manager I spoke to understood clearly that we'd just bought, and were in the process of furnishing, a 3200 square foot home - and this screwup guaranteed I wouldn't be buying anything else from his company.
Posted by: dberger at March 16, 2005 8:20 AM
Ok, stretching a bit now - any way to put the dish out on the edge of the property beyond the trees (and clear of your neighbors' trees)? At least with the Tivo/Comcast news yesterday, the idea of switching back to cable isn't (quite) as painful...
Posted by: Hendel at March 16, 2005 8:36 AM