The things I'll do for terrible television

I’m not sure if it was during the three hours I waited for the Comcast technician to show up, or the sixth time a customer service representative put me on hold or the second trip in less than a week to the Comcast office, but at some point last week I found myself wondering just how much hassle I was willing to put myself through in the name of having access to a wider selection of bad television shows.
The answer, apparently, is a lot.
It really shouldn’t be this hard. I’ve never had a significant problem with a cable company before. Service technicians showed up on time. The service was reliable. Even when there was a problem it worked in my favor. I once got free cable for a year because the company forgot to charge me.
Apparently now I’m paying.
Things went bad pretty much from the start. All I wanted to do was get cable hooked up in my new house. I called the company’s 800 number and told them what I wanted. They told me I couldn’t have it. Apparently the last person to live in my house was a deadbeat who didn’t pay his cable bills. If I wanted access to quality programming like America’s Next Top Model, they said, I’d have to apply in person so I could prove I was who I said I was.
For the record, I am.
Still, even that wasn’t too bad. I set up an installation appointment and even got a great rate on programming.
That’s when things really got obnoxious.
The installation technician showed up last Saturday two minutes before the end of his three-hour installation window. He looked at my house and told me he couldn’t do the job. The house wasn’t connected to the system, he said. It would have to be a new installation, and he didn’t have time, he said.
This confused me, I’ll admit. I was fooled by the fact there was a cable coming out of the wall in two separate rooms in my house. It seemed logical to me that someone would have had to have had cable service at the house in order to be guilty of not paying his bill.
In any case, he left and I called to set up a new appointment. I explained my situation and was put on hold. For a very long time.
While I waited, the technician came back. His schedule had been rearranged, he said. He had time to help me now. He was going to do one quick job and he’d be back. Easy as that.
So, he left. And the customer service rep. to come back on the line to tell me she’d canceled my installation and was ready to schedule a new one. When I explained that was no longer necessary, she seemed dubious. She wanted the technician to check in when he got back.
She had good reason to be uncertain.
When the technician came back he told me he could no longer do the job because the installation had been canceled and he didn’t have access to the good deal I’d gotten at the store. The best he could offer, he said, was a bigger package — even more channels I don’t care about! — for twice the price.
Somehow it didn’t seem like a great deal. So, I made another call to customer service. They couldn’t find the deal I’d gotten, either, and sent me back to the store. It was annoying, but for the kind of money I could save I figured it was worth it. So, I jumped in the car and rushed to Richfield, where the office was located, before they closed Saturday afternoon.
They couldn’t find my deal, either. Apparently this particular cable package existed in this dimension for only a brief moment last Wednesday afternoon thanks to a sub-atomic disturbance caused by solar flares, global warming and the inexplicable fact that According to Jim is still on television.
I’ve been assured now that the situation will be taken care of by the time a technician returns to my house this weekend, but I have my doubts.
A nice set of rabbit ears has never looked quite so good.