Cord Cutters
- Thread starter Wolf
- Start date
I'm heading to Florida for a week to care for my father (had a stroke like 6 years ago) while his caregiver (family friend) is away (her daughter is getting married).
Therefore, I'll be getting 7-8 hours a day of game shows the entire time I'm down there. Most of them re-runs from the 70s. He watches a dedicated game show channel until the 6 o'clock news. It will be a slight variation from the usual "watch the 2nd half of action movies for 7-8 hours -- until the 6 o'clock news" at the in-laws house.
Therefore, I'll be getting 7-8 hours a day of game shows the entire time I'm down there. Most of them re-runs from the 70s. He watches a dedicated game show channel until the 6 o'clock news. It will be a slight variation from the usual "watch the 2nd half of action movies for 7-8 hours -- until the 6 o'clock news" at the in-laws house.
Where in FL? If you're anywhere Ft Lauderdale we should meet. That would be cool.
Last edited:
IdRatherBeSkiing
Sherbert is NOT and NEVER WILL BE ice cream.
Koop actually lives with the Golden Girls.
The other part of changing-over to fiber optic was canceling our Spectrum cable service. Needless to say, they don't make it easy. There's no way to cancel online, so you have to call. Then you go through all the menus. When you finally get to someone who is specifically there to talk about canceling, they just won't do it. Mrs. Scotch, who has decades of experience with everything from handling irate health insurance customers to foreclosing on mortgage holders and repossessing cars, knows how to deal with these shithead phone people. She kept saying "I just want to cancel the service; can you give me a confirmation?". But they have a script, "let's talk about the equipment you have, and the devices you have, and how you use your internet, and what the alternative is like".
She kept making it clear that we have already been wired with fiber, we are going to keep that plan, and we need to cancel the Spectrum service. Over and over again, he said "I'm working on it", and she kept saying "just give me a confirmation when you have it". He would say "okay, it'll be a few minutes". This went on for a while, and then he went away for 5 to 10 minutes. He came back and started to say "okay, here are the options I have for you". Mrs. Scotch lost it. She said he was not doing what she asked, and she was going to call and get someone who will cancel the service, and also call the Public Utility Commissioner.
She called back, and this time, after making things clear, there was a 15 minute wait, and then the guy came back with a cancellation confirmation. They really try to make it near-impossible. Returning the equipment was much easier. The UPS store scans the bar-codes on the stuff, takes it, and gives me a receipt.
I tried to change my Comcast internet to a lesser cost and they put me through similar. I went online it said call. I called she said I had to go online. I was having her guide me through their website to get to the spot where I could have a lesser plan but we were on the phone so long I had to leave my house, so I never got there.
Here's another slice-o-life story that I'm sure you'll all gloss over. Overnight on Monday into Tuesday, our sparkly-new Fidium fiber internet went down. And it never came back up. There was no signal coming into the modem. And with no obvious problem in the house, and no remedy via a reboot, I attempted to "report a problem". As it turns out, I had never contemplated this scenario. The Fidium "Attune" app on my phone confirmed that, yep, we have no internet. But beyond that, we're fucked. They (Consolidated Communications) provided no notification text, no outage info on their site, no info on the Fidium account site either. All problem reporting funnels through a single mechanism - calling an 800 number.
So I did call the number. Twenty times, according to my phone. But that didn't include all the times it was too overloaded to even pick-up. By this time, I had stopped at a Starbucks to sign-on to my work computer, and then I went ahead and drove into the office. (I actually needed to go in anyway, but not like this). I did see that the Fidium Fiber Facebook and X pages reported an outage in NH due to software upgrade problems, but nobody in our local social media area was mentioning any problems. So it didn't seem like it was going to fix itself.
After merely 6 hours of repeated calling, I got through to a nice, helpful person who ran a diagnostic and determined it was a problem outside my house. A service call was ordered, but the first available appointment wasn't until this morning. Fortunately (for me), I had my extra-long community band rehearsal last night.
Anyway, the guy showed-up this morning, and found that a section of the FO wire in the underground conduit was all frayed. It sure seemed like it was rodent damage, like from squirrels or chipmunks, but he also thought it could've gotten that way during installation. And the installers used the super-thin, "inside the house" wire from the telephone pole through the conduit to the house. The repair guy said that the company tells them to do that (to save money), but he replaced it with the "outside" stuff, which is twice the diameter and has a hard, thick (easy now!) coating. At the house end of the conduit, they used the same old piece of tape to cover the opening, which is why there were (probably) rodents in there. I fully sealed it up. And our internet is running fine again. I will keep an eye on that conduit.
So I did call the number. Twenty times, according to my phone. But that didn't include all the times it was too overloaded to even pick-up. By this time, I had stopped at a Starbucks to sign-on to my work computer, and then I went ahead and drove into the office. (I actually needed to go in anyway, but not like this). I did see that the Fidium Fiber Facebook and X pages reported an outage in NH due to software upgrade problems, but nobody in our local social media area was mentioning any problems. So it didn't seem like it was going to fix itself.
After merely 6 hours of repeated calling, I got through to a nice, helpful person who ran a diagnostic and determined it was a problem outside my house. A service call was ordered, but the first available appointment wasn't until this morning. Fortunately (for me), I had my extra-long community band rehearsal last night.
Anyway, the guy showed-up this morning, and found that a section of the FO wire in the underground conduit was all frayed. It sure seemed like it was rodent damage, like from squirrels or chipmunks, but he also thought it could've gotten that way during installation. And the installers used the super-thin, "inside the house" wire from the telephone pole through the conduit to the house. The repair guy said that the company tells them to do that (to save money), but he replaced it with the "outside" stuff, which is twice the diameter and has a hard, thick (easy now!) coating. At the house end of the conduit, they used the same old piece of tape to cover the opening, which is why there were (probably) rodents in there. I fully sealed it up. And our internet is running fine again. I will keep an eye on that conduit.
IdRatherBeSkiing
Sherbert is NOT and NEVER WILL BE ice cream.
The inspiration behind adding a "TLDR" to posts
I've casually considered moving to Fidium if/when it comes to my neighborhood. Seeing this pushes me away from this idea!
I would definitely not let this turn you off to Fidium. While I totally agree that they need a better customer interface system at the company level, everything else has been great. For example, the installers and repair people will text me directly, and they provide confirmations about service etc. And when the repair guy came out, it gave me a map showing the repair truck driving to our house. Also, both the installers and repair person took care of everything by themselves, in one shot. With Comcast, for example, it took 3 different people to come out and do everything.
And my situation was atypical. It was a lone outage due to a damaged exterior wire. Most outages involve a street, or an area, or a region. And they do provide info on Facebook and (formerly) Twitter. The product is great, the equipment is top-notch, and it works well. And every other provider, whether it's Spectrum or Comcast, sucks hard when it comes to customer service. I've had so many horror stories from both of them.
At least when I got through to a customer service person, she was nice, and helpful, and ran a diagnostic while I was on the call. And they got someone out here the next morning, just for a problem only affecting me. Not bad, I say.