Honey?

With Crystal posting blogs so much recently I wanted to take my turn and write a quick note. My life during the week is busy and uneventful with all my travelling going on. When I get home on Thursday night, all I want to do for the weekend is relax and enjoy being home. I spend all week being gone so I want to spend as much time on the weekend actually being in the house that I work so hard for. The only downside to this is with Crystal being cooped up at home all week. She only wants us to leave the house when I'm back. We usually find a good compromise.

During the week I am way too busy to follow regular tv shows. By the time I eat dinner and get back to the hotel, it is usually in the vicinity of 8-9pm. I then (sometimes) try to get in a workout and watch an episode or two of Star Trek: The Next Generation on my laptop (supernerd, I know...) before video chatting with C at 10. We try and wrap up before 11 and I go to bed as soon as I can after that.

Thank goodness for the DVR which allows me to still follow the shows I care about (Biggest Loser, Big Bang, Bones, etc). While I realize I can track all these episodes down online, they are available only temporarily and I am paying for the convenience of the cable company to figure this all out for me.

This evening Crystal got a call from her family to update her on the blizzard (10 inches and counting!) and I took the opportunity to watch one of my recorded shows that she doesn't care to see anyways. To my dismay, the first 50 minutes of the show were of the world series going into extra innings and I only got 5-10 minutes of what I wanted to see. Now I love sports more than the average man, but let's be honest: watching a recorded sporting event, with only a passing interest in either team, when you already know the outcome, is painfully boring.

This exact scenario is the reason we gave up trying to follow The Amazing Race and Undercover Bosses. 60 minutes always went long because of a prior football game and I got sick of tracking down episodes online just to see the last 15-30 minutes. In my moment of frustration, I decided to lodge my complaint with the cable company which will remain anonymous.

As the website does not allow users to email in a comment or complaint, I clicked the button to chat with someone. My specific complaint being, I am paying more than they deserve money for their services, tv guide information, and dvr access. These things are supposed to happen automatically. When they refuse to update the tv guide when sporting events, breaking news, etc cause channels to push back their shows, any recordings I had planned become a waste of dvr space. It seems so simple to push out a tiny update to the tv guide for one channel. It is not uncommon for them to send us messages through the dvr receiver already.

Apparently it's not that simple...

I chatted with a nice lady named Honey (Honey?!?). Don't worry, I was very kind and polite. I just wanted my voice and complaint to be heard. I did not actually expect any resolution. Her solution was for me to reset the entire receiver anytime there is a delay on a channel with a show I might be interested in. I explained that I required the dvr because I travel weekly and cannot constantly monitor shows (or reset it on demand!). That's why I pay them to take care of all that for me. Her response was then for me to call sales and ask them :)

The reason for this long story was to show how our conversation ended. Because she had no answer for me, she tried to butter me up at the end.

Then it started to get a little strange...

Then it got even stranger...

So I humored her.

Anywho, that's where our conversation ended. Crystal and I had a really good laugh at how casual that conversation got in a hurry. Maybe it's a new call center tactic?

Only four more weeks of travelling for the rest of the year!