Two Meditations on Replacing a Cable Box

There was all manner of cable company weirdness at the homestead yesterday. It was like a semi-self-correcting cascade failure: first the internet connection, then the phone, though television service was still fine. I busied myself resetting modems (cable and phone) and eventually it all worked itself out.

Then the oddness started. We lost our HD channels, so I switched to the 'regular' version of the channel to wait it out, see if it would correct itself again. About ten minutes later, though, the box itself started to make some alarming clicking noises. I mean, Poltergeist-style. (Combine this with my daughter's latest habit of randomly proclaiming, "It's coming!" and you can see why I was momentarily freaked out.)

I tried to power it off with the remote to no avail, so I got up and yanked out the power cable. In the vain hope that a power cycle would somehow help things, I plugged it back in, only to observe the problem even worse than it had been the first time.

A call to Comcast, with a remarkably laid-back customer service agent (which I thought was a thing of the past, as those CS agents seem to be judged on call length more than customer satisfaction) led us to the idea that the construction in my area had caused my intermittent outages, and also a surge of some kind when the cable was fully restored that one of my boxes survived, but the older, more beat-up looking of the two, did not.

I got the address of the "closest" service center (if you, like me, can observe that they're never close to where you live, that's actually a good thing, which I'll get to later) and planned my route for after the B got up from her nap. The good thing was that the office was open until 7:00, so it allowed me, home-bound during her nap, to still make it there after she got up. Thumbs up on the office hours.

It came time to head over there and we took off, GPS and Google Maps-assisted. The neighborhood got worse and worse as I got closer and closer. I had used street view to look around where the office was so that I would more easily recognize the office once I got there (unnecessary, as it turns out...there was a huge sign that even my sense of direction-impaired butt could see) and the building opposite the cable office, whose sign was too blurry to read in Google street view, turned out to be a "Gentleman's Club". Ahem.

I went in to retrieve my new box and was asked for my saga yet again, but it was, I think, just conversational. The content of my story didn't seem to be a contingency on getting my box, but a way to pass the time while he brought up my account and switched the old box out and the new box in. Interestingly, I was told I was getting the last one, and it was indeed the only one of its kind in the stack on the table behind him. I mentioned that the phone agent had told me she thought they had "plenty", since, as the agents can't see inventory for the different offices, they are supposed to send an email to the phone center when they are running low. This apparently reminded him of what he was supposed to do (though that hadn't been my intent, I just mentioned it in stream-of-consciousness mode) and he was working on it when I left with my prize.

So my first meditation, for those scoring from the title, is that cable service centers are always in the Bad Part of Town.

On the ride home, I decided to actually listen to the GPS and take the highway, instead of the side streets I tricked it into on the way there. There were many changes from one road to another, and in those merges, I realized the second of the things I learned on my trip yesterday.

By far, and I mean a very wide margin, the drivers of cars bearing a specific sort of Colorado plate seem to be the ones most likely to try to run you off the road, stay ahead of you on a merge at any cost, or refuse to let you switch lanes. That plate is this one, initially added to the roster after the Columbine school shootings, but now seems to be in use more by abortion opponents more than people concerned with schoolyard violence:



Not one, not two, but three cars with this type of license plate messed with me on my way there or my way back. I assure you, with my two year old in the car, I err on the side of caution, so I was not driving so aggressively as to anger everyone around me. One of them was clearly behind me as I tried to merge onto I-270, with plenty of space ahead of them for me to come in and still leave him sufficient following distance, but he sped up and paced me, forcing me to slow down to merge in behind him.

He was, of course, one of those Colorado drivers (and yes, I say Colorado, because this is more prevalent here than ANYWHERE else I've ever driven) who, once all the merging and whatnot is done, they drive along the highway at LEAST ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

I guess there were sort of two driving meditations there at the end, the first about the Respect Life plate and the second about the Colorado Sunday Driver phenomenon, but I'm far too lazy to change the title now.