Blog: Cablevision

A Washington Mutual branch - a bank, with actual money, in Manhattan no less - is laid out like a retail store where the tellers stand at small tables with the customers. But meanwhile, the Cablevision store in Hoboken, New Jersey sports inch thick plexiglass between the employees and the customers, and a metal box where the customer places an item and closes the door before the employee will open the door on the other side. These folks could hole up with their Scientific Atlanta cable boxes against an army. Is the cable service that bad that people decide to take out their aggressions on the Cablevision service center? Or seriously, are cable boxes such an attractive robbery target? A Best Buy doesn't hold a candle to this place in terms of security.

I get the box home only to find an error message saying it's not authorized. So I call customer service. After navigating a very slow series of menus, I get a voice recognition based system for diagnosing the problem. It's actually pretty good, giving a lot of details and asking sensible questions along the way. However, once I reset the box as it instructs, it tells me that the time should appear. But the error has returned, so no time. When I tell it the time hasn't come on yet, it says that it can take 15 minutes, so I should call back - and then hangs up on me! Not very user friendly, especially since I have to navigate the slow menus again. And by slow, I mean when you call, it takes 30 sconds just to get to the "press 1 for English" prompt, and then another ten after pressing 1 just to have the second menu start up. Meanwhile, once I did manage to get a human (by pressing zero over and over until it gave up), she was able to fix the problem in literally one minute.

Now I have working cable service. But I never thought that this Scientific Atlanta DVR - the Explorer 8300 - could be even worse than the 8000 I got from Time Warner. The interface is even clunkier than on the 8000, which is crap compared to a TiVo. After fast forwarding, it doesn't automatically jump back a few seconds. And it doesn't remember where you are in a show if you stop watching it and come back later. What's oddest about all this is the very same company has much better software - still crappy, but worlds better. Anyway, I'd upgrade to something better, but I actually would just as soon not have too much incentive to watch TV.