Wednesday, September 25,2002
On monkeys, and why satellite service sucks.

I promised to document my monkey comments, and in so promising, I actually see to have documented the punch line…

Anyway, Monday night, I noticed that our 2700 receiver (the old crappy one that doesn’t even have timers) didn’t have all the channels that we pay for. I mentioned to Erin that it was her turn to call tech support, since I’d spent so much time on the phone with them Sunday night.

Erin called them, was on hold for about 20 minutes, then talked to a tech, who walked her through a bunch of troubleshooting steps, before deciding that “nothing is wrong” so in order to get our programming sent to the receiver, she’d remove the receiver from our account, then add it back in. “Turn off the receiver for 25 minutes, and everything should be fine.”

It was halftime, so I figured it was no big deal. After the 25 minutes was up (actually a little longer) I turned the receiver back on, to find that we had four channels now - all the “expressvu infomercial” channels, and that’s it.

Erin called back, and talked to a guy who insisted that he was “trying to help us,” all the while the only help he actually offered was to tell us that he was “trying to help us.” Apparently saying it enough times makes it true.

At one point he pulled out the old “it can take up to 24 hours for this kind of change to take place” CYA statement. My response was that I know the connection to the satellite takes place at the speed of light, and the connection from the satellite to the dish is also at the speed of light (close enough) to which he basically just repeated himself again. Here’s where the monkeys come in…

As I said yesterday, I know that they have to give the monkeys their breaks, and that it’s quite difficult to peel bananas in space. I mean, the slightest movement can send you spinning, which brings up yesterday’s bananas, and then you have to peel more. It’s a vicious cycle, and as Dave pointed out yesterday, there’s the whole feces throwing issue too. We finally got things straightened out yesterday morning (miraculously) and the 2700 seems to be working normally (despite what our good friend the tech “support” monster called a “defective receiver”)

It was quite a frustrating experience, though really, out of 4 CSRs that we talked to, we got one really bad one, two average (but incompetent) ones, and one excellent one. Overall, those are stellar CSR numbers, no?

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Aw, they were just about to show some close-ups of the rod!” - Bart

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Copyright (c) 2001 Greg Mitchell