When we moved into a new place a few years ago I had to switch to a new cable TV company; Charter. Seemed fine for a while, then I got a new TiVo Premiere box (long time TiVo user/advocate) and ordered up HD digital service from Charter. Everyone said, "Oh, you have to go HD, you'll never look back!" But HD digital from Charter was a nightmare. They blamed the TiVo box, TiVo blamed Charter, and meanwhile we just got dozens of "partial" recordings and randomly blank channels. As for Charter's support -- where do I begin? "I see here you have an HD set-top box..." "No, I have TiVo Premiere, a cable card and a tuning adaptor." Silence. Crickets chirping. "So...you want to order an HD set-top box, am I correct?" "No, I would just like the service to work." "Okay, let me transfer you to the first of the seven rings of Dante's Inferno, please hold!"It went on like that for months. Half a dozen service calls with a different tech telling me a different thing each time, dozens of phone calls to support, where even more people told me even more different things. Finally I had one partial recording too many, I guess, and I hopped over to the directv.com site and signed up with them. Three days later the guy showed up and mounted the dish, installed the boxes and hooked the system up to our router via DECA (DirecTV's version of MOCA) in a little over two hours. I'm so used to the failure of the digital cable that the reliability (so far) of the dish system keeps surprising me. We had a dish 10 or 12 years ago, but it was pretty basic stuff compared to this modern system. One of the things that kept me from switching a long time ago was TiVo. I didn't want to abandon it (it doesn't work with satellite systems), but TiVo Premiere has its own set of problems, so I pulled the plug on the TiVo and I have to admit that I don't miss it it all. The DirecTV DVR is about a thousand times faster than TiVo, and, as an added bonus, it actually works. So...anyone in the market for a TiVo Premiere with 2.5 years of paid service remaining? I guess I haven't exactly done a good job of selling it here...
Charter sucks. There is just no other way to say it. They are probably by far the absolute worst company I have ever seen.
Yeah, I'm really digging DirecTV. But coming from the horror that was Charter, I'd probably be impressed by two tin cans and a mile of string.
They must love me, because I got a robo-call from Charter this morning saying that I haven't returned my equipment (which the guy picked up on Thursday and I have a receipt for) and they are charging my account (what account?) for the value of the crap that never worked right anyway. So I called and spent 10 minutes trying to get through the voice-prompt system and the guy on the other end asks me all things that I already entered in to the system, then says, "It looks like you still have a modem, and..." I had to interrupt him there and inform him that I didn't have internet service through them, but rather TV service. It goes on (and on), but I don't know if I can bear to type anymore. Just when I thought they were out of my life, they come back like a crazy ex boiling rabbits on my stove...
