Why I'm Going To Be Mad For The Next 3 Weeks...

The following is most definitely a rant. Read at your own risk.

I am soooo... mad right now. I noticed today that I was not getting any of my local channels (NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC). I noticed this because I was going to set my Tivo to record the Super Bowl so I could watch the commercials. No locals. Okay...so I decided to reset the DirecTV receiver. It usually works. Ha ha. Not this time. I get home from church and there are still no locals. So I call DirecTV.

First I get some chick in India who says her name is Nell. Yeah right. She has to transfer me to a technician. Yay...we're back in America.

Side Note: You need to realize that I no longer have a landline and so I'm on my cell the whole time without very good reception.

Lady #2 (Savanna?) tells me that it is the satellite and they will have to replace it. Currently I have two satellites, one for regular channels and one for locals. Apparently they now have a new HDTV satellite that will run both locals and regular channels. Sign me up!

Hold your horses... First of all they can't come out until the 21st. THREE WEEKS AWAY!!! As if that is not bad enough, I find out that they will have to replace my receiver and the new one is a DVR receiver, not Tivo. More on that in a minute. So this doesn't take much time to explain, but took the lady around 40 minutes to do...AND...she kept putting me on hold for 10 minutes at a time. She said she had the work order set up and then she was going to check on the Tivo thing because I was NOT happy about losing Tivo. WE GOT CUT OFF!!! There's no way to get back to the same person again. I waited a few minutes to see if she would call me back and then decided to go ahead and call DirecTV again.

So I get a whole new lady (luckily we're still in America). I have to START ALL OVER AGAIN! She said there was no way to find out who I had been talking to. (What?) To her credit, lady #3 did not take as long to do all this. Come to find out, lady #2 had NOT set up the work order, so I had to do that all over again (didn't take as long this time). AND...I found out that if I wanted my local channels back, I had to switch to a DVR receiver. I was NOT happy to say the least.

At this point I’m really wondering what lady #2 was doing the whole time we were on the phone. She seemed helpful, but in retrospect was probably taking 10 minute coffee breaks to complain to her co-workers about how much her job sucks.

I apologized for being short with lady #3. I told her that I was stressed because I had already been on the phone for an hour and I had to start over. I didn't want her to think I was a jerk, plus you usually get more if you're nice and I was about to ask for some kind of compensation for losing my locals for 3 weeks. I got $5 off for the next 3 months...woopee.

About the Tivo thing: Tivo is awesome. Tivo is not the same as regular DVR. If you have never had Tivo, I'm sure you think your DVR is awesome...it is not. Tivos are smart. They learn what you like. I will come home and my Tivo has recorded something that I didn't ask it to just because it thinks I might like it. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I am very grateful to Tivo for showing me a new program. I also don't have to set up 100s of season passes to obscure shows. I just give something a thumbs up and Tivo will record it if there's space and nothing else is recording. I don't have a season pass to How Clean Is Your House, but I watch it sometimes because sometimes Tivo will record it for me. This is all important to me because I do not watch live TV...ever. I always watch something that is recorded so I can fast forward through commercials. I don't do commercials. If I really want to watch something, I still wait at least 15-20 minutes for it to record so I can FF through commercials. Tivo is great. I am VERY upset about this.

Also, I will now be missing many of my favorite shows. For example: House, Grey's Anatomy, Numb3rs...and AMERICAN IDOL!! I guess I will have to try to watch the ones I can't live without on the internet, but my connection is not that fast. This is going to be a pain. Also, you usually have to wait a day to watch anything like that. AND...I have to go through and set up all new season passes on the new receiver once I get it.

Please feel sorry for me and realize that I might be a little on the aggravated side for the next 3 weeks (probably longer because I'll have to get use to the DVR).