As my readership will know, I recently acquired a Tivo Series 3. The Comcast people came to install the two CableCards that it takes yesterday and guess what? I still can’t watch cable on my TiVo.
How did he screw up? Let me count the ways. First off, he was apparently allergic to my cats. That’s unfortunate, but not really my problem. Perhaps they should have a pet pre-screening question on the phone to send out a tech who isn’t eager to go because he can barely breathe or see.
It took him 3 hours to install cable to three televisions, one of which doesn’t work. Why it took him that long, I can’t really say. I’m not a cable tech so maybe it’s just that hard.
Let’s focus on the main television with the TiVo, though, because that’s where all the weirdness occurred. In preparation for Comcast’s arrival, we hooked up the TiVo, made sure it worked through our network and hooked up our over-the-air antenna to one of its many inputs.
He unhooked the antenna with a grumbling along the lines of “When are you ever going to use your antenna?” My wife didn’t question his assumption because she figured we’d just hook it right back up after he left.
This proved harder than expected since he STOLE our coax that was going from the wall to the TiVo. That’s right – not only did he unhook it from the TiVo, he also unhooked it from the wall and took it with him. WTF?
He then proceeded to install the CableCards one by one, waiting 20+ minutes between each because Comcast had to do some mojo on their end that took a long long long time to do. After that, he set the CableCards to “Acquire Program Information” which is just a little spinny thing that seems to take a really long time.
He got restless, apparently, and being tired of allergic reactions from the hell-demons that are my cats, he informed my wife that he was leaving and that everything would work fine. Wrong. Nothing worked fine. The spinny thing ended with an error that the CableCards weren’t responding properly.
A lot of tinkering on our part and two calls to Comcast later, it would appear that Comcast is unable to send a signal to the CableCards and they don’t know what’s wrong.
So what’s the answer to that? Send another inept technician out to fix the problem. Yippee! At least they’re coming on Saturday this time…
Check out this article over at the Unofficial TiVo Blog for another account of trying to get the TiVo Series 3 working with the cable company.
There’s also some insight from a comment that most of the problems are office-side and not tech-side.
Here’s hoping the dummies can figure it out on Saturday when they come.
I forgot to mention it in my post but, the tech that I had also disconnected my antenna. When I got home I noticed that the antenna was no longer working. Good luck with your next appointment!