That's Comcastic!

This is not my TV or my house! Stock photos for lazy blogger!


I DVR Keith Olbermann every night, so I can watch "Countdown" while I munch my breakfast in the morning. Procedure is the same: watch show, delete.

Except for that Friday the 13th (!) when the show simply would not delete. I call Comcast, Comcast tells me they never heard of this happening and then the guy asks for the serial number on my cable box. I ask where is this number. He says on back of cable box. I tell him there are so many numbers back there it looks like a men's room stall wall. He does not laugh. He tells me to call back to make a service appointment.

I made the service appointment, and then, no fewer than three times did Comcast call me to make sure that I still wanted the guy to come. I guess they do this for every service call, but I certainly would have called to cancel if the problem had healed by itself which, to my experience, happens but rarely in electronics.

Anyway, Cable Guy shows up Saturday morning and I tell him there is a show on the box that I have watched and tried to delete and it will not delete. He said he had never heard of that. "That's a new one on ME!," he exclaimed. That's a sentence you don't want to hear from your cable guy, or your doctor, or your wife. But I showed him that the show just would not go away. After we made some predictable jokes about how "Keith Olbermann must really be a stubborn guy; he won't go away!" he tried it himself. I love that. That's sort of the same thing as someone coming along and pushing the elevator button when you have already done so. But it didn't work for him any more than it did for me, so I said, "maybe we need to reset the box; do you know how to do that?" And he said, "Yeah, let me make a technical adjustment over here..." and he reset the box.

Which then allowed us to delete the show, so keep that in mind, Comcast people! That's the secret when something gets stuck...reset the box.

So I asked him what was the secret technical thing that he had to do to reset the box and he said, "I unplugged it."