• Member Since 9th Jul, 2012
  • offline last seen May 5th, 2019

MythrilMoth


LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

More Blog Posts3908

Feb
12th
2017

First World Problems/Life Disruptions: Weekend Edition · 8:22pm Feb 12th, 2017

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomyweekend'sbeenkindofamess.

EDIT: Earlier today, to shake out some of the cobwebs, I started working on a new Ladybug fic I've had in mind for a while now. I'm not giving it top priority and might not even publish it for a while now, but don't be too surprised if I suddenly announce a new Ladybug fic out of the blue. Besides, the release of the series on Netflix is good incentive to unleash a new Ladybug story. :raritywink:

EDIT2: Hoooooolyshit the enhanced On Demand menu on this new box. I'm in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurve...



Friday, my cable box started acting up and some channels I watch regularly stopped showing up, including DIscovery Family and Disney XD. And some channels would come and go: El Rey disappeared, then reappeared. BBC America worked, then didn't. Nicktoons kept coming and going. And so forth, and so on.

Saturday morning I put in a call for tech support. At the same time, I also asked about getting a box upgrade since I'm due for one anyway and my cable provider allows for a free box upgrade once during a customer's service cycle. I had had the same box for four years and the old SA4200 series boxes are garbage; TWC/Spectrum's current service is optimized for the new Arris boxes. They put in an order to mail one out to me via FedEx which is due Tuesday. In the meantime, service call remained in effect.

Service call was supposed to be yesterday afternoon, but the CS goofed and set it for today. No big. Also learned that Spectrum is doing some digital cable tier shuffling in order to bilk customers out of more money, and there is a possibility I might lose Discovery Family in the future unless I upgrade.

Uhh...yeah, that's a problem. But for now, I'm grandfathered in on the old TWC service packages, so for the time being, as long as I make no changes to my service, I won't lose DFC or anything else I currently enjoy regularly. For now. So there's a sense of a blade hanging over my neck there.

Got a ship notification on the new box and estimated delivery, tracking, etc. Yeah, OK. Also heard from a higher-level CS that in all likelihood my old box WAS the problem. Yeah, OK.

Tech guy came out, verified my old box was in the process of dying--in fact, was mostly dead. No surprise there. Got me a new box off the truck because he couldn't leave from the call until my service was back to 100%. No objections here, I can ship the new box back/cart it back to the business office just as easily as I could mail the old one back after swapping.

Two complications arose during setup of the new box: (1) system conflict with the en-route box and the "new new" box caused EVERYTHING to fail until he sorted it out with the office. That took about 15 minutes.

(2) After he swapped out my coax and installed the new box, he discovered I had too much signal coming through, and it was scrambling a lot of HD channels. It took him about 40 minutes to swap out splitters and adjust my signal until both my Internet and cable were functioning properly.

So, after an entire weekend of only having 66% of my cable service and 100% of my Internet service, I now have 100% of my cable AND Internet service, am in the process of setting up all my favorite channels and reminders again on the new Arris box, and I'm good to go...

Except (a) I've got a box to return when it comes in because they can't cancel an en-route shipment, and (b) I am now completely fucking paranoid about arbitrarily losing Discovery Family because Spectrum wants to be dicks. And if they take away my DFC, there's gonna be hell. So I may have to go down to the business office in person (I've got other shit to do this week anyway) and have a talk with them about this stuff, and stress that (a) I'm on a fixed income, (b) I can't afford to pay more for their service than I'm already paying, and (c) it'd be great if I could keep exactly the channels I have now and not, y'know, lose the one channel I really do not want to lose when I don't give a flying fuck about any of those other channels on the Tier 2 thing.

I wish the merger had never happened. -_-# But at least I got a new cable box, which I've wanted since last year when my aunt and uncle finally upgraded to digital cable and got THEIR new boxes.

Comments ( 8 )

Eh, even if you lose Discovery Channel, you can still watch MLP online

4419565 I'm aware of this but it's the principle of the thing. I pay for a cable subscription that includes Discovery Family. It isn't right for them to arbitrarily say I have to pay more to get that and a handful of other channels in order to get 400+ more channels I don't want and will never watch. Also, I prefer to watch things legally. :raritywink:

When I went down the the office of Comcast to downgrade my subscription because I had a lot of channels I wasn't using, I just told them I was unemployed. It's a really strong reason they can't really argue with, so they just gave me a basic plan with no hassle and no suprise upgrades one year down the line.

So, I know what the first world is, and I know what the third world is. What's the second world? Is it the moon? I bet it's the moon. Let's go to the moon and have second world problems like breathing and heat deprivation and giant scary faces and witches who use rubber-suited monsters to attack teenagers.

This is a good plan guys, let's make it happen.

4419990

What's the second world?

I know you used that as the lead-in to a joke, but if you genuinely don't know; the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations, originally. Nowadays, when it's used at all, it refers to countries that are between the First and Third Worlds in terms of economic development.

4420113

Interesting. I'll keep that in mind.

For what it's worth, pain medicine has been keeping me drowsy today. That is why I posted that post in the first place. Seemed like a better idea a few hours ago.

I know precisely what you're talking about (Pleads the fifth on why). And yeah, the new box software rolled out in more areas, been hearing a lot of good things about it.

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