Cable TV nightmare...

Let me tell you a little story, 2 1/5 years in the making...

So, the wife and I moved in together Valentine's Day 2004. We had her little 19" TV, no cable, and the little DVD player she won at her company birthday party. Eventually, we hooked my desktop stereo up to it. Our computer was a 466MHz Gateway with a 15" CRT. Not a "high speed, low drag" operation.

Fast-forward to this past weekend. Now, we've got a 32" LCD HDTV, a new HDTV-upconvert DVD player, a 700W home theater receiver, and a 27" TV and DVD player for the bedroom. Our computer is an overclocked 3.2 GHz speed-demon with 2 GB of RAM and a 19" LCD... the same size as our old TV, coincidentally.

Still no cable TV.

On the way home from somewhere, the wife says to me, "Let's think about getting cable. I didn't want cable, because I'm afraid you'll flip and flip and flip the channels and drive me nuts. But, what the hell, I want my MTV." Not exactly that, but close. I quickly talk her into the HD DVR, so that I can record shows while I'm at work, and she can fast-forward through commercials.

So, she calls Saturday, makes an appointment for Tuesday. The guy blows the appointment, of course. When he shows up, he's a smelly 50-something Russian guy named Yuri. Yuri smells really bad. But, it is Ultra-Summer in Florida, you learn to excuse these things at 4:30 in the afternoon. Yuri is also unable to run a cable jack behind our TV, so we have a long coaxial stretching across the living room. Did I mention that Yuri is kind of an older Russian guy? This is important later in the story.

It is coming on 6:00, we want to sit down and eat, and we come to find out that Yuri can't program our brand-new TV into the universal remote that comes with the DVR. I don't care, I am getting a $150 universal remote for my birthday. Yuri cares, though. Yuri cares alot because he doesn't know what to do when the three codes he has don't work. A half-hour later, he still hasn't done ANYTHING, because he's stuck on getting the cable remote to turn on my TV. Once I get him to give up on that? He doesn't know how to connect the DVR to my TV. He really doesn't know how to turn the box on. He absolutely doesn't know how to get it to show a picture on my TV. And, because he is technology-illiterate, and because he barely speaks English, there is absolutely no way that he can ask me the right questions, or understand what I'm telling him, in order to GET THIS GODDAMNED SHOW ON THE ROAD!

Finally, I kick him out.

Turns out, you have to convince the TV to accept the signal by doing the autoscan. Then, you have to set up the box, except the setup wizard simply doesn't work. I go online, get past all this... and then the signal is crap, because Yuri, when running the cable across my 18'x14' living room, decided I needed about 800' of extra coaxial. That, and the box is a little bit shitty.

So, this morning, fucking Yuri comes back with a new box. I get him to trim the excess cable, give me the new box, and otherwise shut up and stay out of my way. 10 minutes later, I have a functioning DVR.

Also, I have an absolute disaster in my living room, from moving everything around so much. Oh well.... I can watch all the Law & Order repeats I like!!