Traffic pro

Lately we have had problems with one of our digital cable boxes. From time to time the picture screws up. It is usually the low number channels and it is usually when the DVR is recording something. We go back to watch a recording and find that we can not even watch it. It will have weird pixels or a message that says, "Channel will be available shortly".

I have called the cable company just to get a very long interactive troubleshooting message. That woman on the recording makes me want to wring her neck. It is like 30 minutes of "Please unplug your cable box and say continue when you are finished. If you do not understand what I am saying say help." A lot of the messages are much longer and if any noise is made while she talks she will then say, "I am sorry, maybe you did not understand. I will start again." She will then repeat the whole thing.

I have gone through that. I have gone through talking to two idiots, I mean techs. Everyone has the same answer. "I will attempt to connect to your cable box and see if there is a problem." Then the next response is always, "I have sent a message to your cable box to rest it but it will take sometimes more than an hour to finish so give it time before you call back." I am assuming that in moron, I mean tech terms this really means, "I have no idea what is wrong and I can not fix it. Please do not call back during my shift. Let someone else deal with it."

I figure that the digital cable box is bad and I will have to get a new one. This means that I will have to drive into Madison and swap it. I do not drive in downtown Madison. I also have around 20 movies on the DVR waiting to be watched so I just deal with a bad picture for a few days when it happens.

James looked into Direct TV Service since it is much cheaper than what we are paying. He checked out prices and what deals Direct TV had. He even got as far as picking a package and starting the sign up process.

He asked me to get my bank card and I started to get excited. They have some great deals and great channels. A lot of times the equipment is free as long as you contract to stay with them for awhile.

That is where the problem came in. As you all know we move a lot because of James work. This is the first time in years that we have lived somewhere more than a year. This means that if we want a Direct TV System we have to buy it ourselves. We would have to pay like $350 up front for the equipment and then get back $5 a month that we stayed with them.

So unless some company wants to give us the equipment for free to review and write about we will be sticking to our ever failing cable company.