I finally caved in and had Comcast come in and install cable and high speed internet at my new place. I've been feeling cut off from the world not watching Jon Stewart and few other things. And I had been using my landlord's wireless internet signal, with her permission, but the connection was weak, it would go down all the time and it was starting to drive me insane.

So when I got a flier from Comcast with a deal for 85 bucks that included HBO and a DVR, I called to get it. They surprised me by not only giving me an appointment the next day, but also giving me a 2 hour time period instead of their normal half day. The guy came (he actually arrived early when I was in the shower) but wouldn't install the cable jack because I didn't have written permission from my landlord, who conveniently was in Phoenix. I called her and rescheduled the appointment for Monday.

We had talked about it before and she had given me permission to have the jack installed, but I didn't realize that I needed a written notice. I thought she could fax something to me, but wasn't in a place with a fax machine until Monday. On Monday morning, I got a call from the technician saying he was in the area and could come right now instead of the 4-6pm appointment time. I thought about it for a second, and said ok, but give me 15 minutes.

I threw on some clothes, went into my office (I don't have a printer at home) and typed a permission letter from my landlord, printed it out and returned home. Illegal, maybe. Expedient, definitely.

Ironically, the technician, not the same guy who came to my house last Friday, never even asked about it. He just went about his business, drilled a hole from the garage into my living room, hooked up the cable from the pole to the house and brought the box into my place to install it.

Here's where the problem started. The first problem is that I have an old TV. It's a 27" RCA that I bought in, I think, 1998, right before I moved back from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. It's a great TV. It's worked well all these years, but it doesn't have video input jacks, just a cable jack. So I have to use an RF modulator just to get my DVD player to work and it will not work with the digital DVR box which I paid for. Fuck. So the decision now is whether to get a new TV, if so which one to get and where to get it.

The second problem, and the real problem, is that the box that the DVR came in, which the tech put on the floor in front of the TV, had these enormous staples in it which nicely gouged up my hardwood floor. When I saw it, I put a call into Comcast immediately. They said that someone from customer service would call me back within 24 hours. I just got off the phone with them, slightly more than 24 hours after I registered my complaint, but not by much. The woman wanted to confirm what happened and said someone would call me with 3 business days to resolve the issue which probably involves a claims adjuster from their insurance company. Oh, what fun.

Meantime, I hooked into the digital world again. I have HBO so I can now watch Rome, amongst other things. Probably going to be a huge time suck. I'm going to have to fight it.