Tag: Cablevision

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Boring Stuff

This was a moderately crappy weekend.

On Saturday I spent most of the day in a Russian restaurant celebrating my father-in-law’s birthday. Did I mention that I hate Russian restaurants? I have to drink at least 4-5 shots of vodka to stop feeling completely disgusted by music and decor. God, I hate those places. If I were evil overlord, I’d definitely prohibit them.

On Sunday I spent most of the day cleaning up my crappy apartment. Oh, and trying to get DSL working again. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get something out of a level 2 support tech, because the regular drones that have to work weekends can’t help me.

Remember I was bitching about cable outage (it took me 3 week to get it back working)? Well, it turned out that the outage was caused by the damn Cablevision techs that were installing digital cable. No matter how much I turboed, I could not weasel out of taking a day off and waiting for the damn tech to come to my apartment. I was so busy at work that I did not even call the Cablevision customer service and get them to credit my account for the outage.

I’ve spent a few hours installing an old modem I borrowed from my dad. The damn thing wasn’t even PCI. It was ISA. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to install any modem in less than 2 hours. Have you?

Today a fan fell off from the second processor in my home computer. Luckily it was an Intel and not an AMD chip, so it did not burn, but just shut down my computer. I hear that AMD has fixed the problem with burning chips, but still.

I need to get new fans. Those Thermaltake orb coolers only look cool. They are noisy and don’t work very well. I think I’ll get a pair of normal Intel fans. It’s not like I am overclocking or anything, I don’t need anything fancy. Any suggestions?

Now, that the boring part is over, here are some artsy-fartsy New York-ey pictures.




This was a moderately crappy weekend.

On Saturday I spent most of the day in a Russian restaurant celebrating my father-in-law’s birthday. Did I mention that I hate Russian restaurants? I have to drink at least 4-5 shots of vodka to stop feeling completely disgusted by music and decor. God, I hate those places. If I were evil overlord, I’d definitely prohibit them.

On Sunday I spent most of the day cleaning up my crappy apartment. Oh, and trying to get DSL working again. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get something out of a level 2 support tech, because the regular drones that have to work weekends can’t help me.

Remember I was bitching about cable outage (it took me 3 week to get it back working)? Well, it turned out that the outage was caused by the damn Cablevision techs that were installing digital cable. No matter how much I turboed, I could not weasel out of taking a day off and waiting for the damn tech to come to my apartment. I was so busy at work that I did not even call the Cablevision customer service and get them to credit my account for the outage.

I’ve spent a few hours installing an old modem I borrowed from my dad. The damn thing wasn’t even PCI. It was ISA. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to install any modem in less than 2 hours. Have you?

Today a fan fell off from the second processor in my home computer. Luckily it was an Intel and not an AMD chip, so it did not burn, but just shut down my computer. I hear that AMD has fixed the problem with burning chips, but still.

I need to get new fans. Those Thermaltake orb coolers only look cool. They are noisy and don’t work very well. I think I’ll get a pair of normal Intel fans. It’s not like I am overclocking or anything, I don’t need anything fancy. Any suggestions?

Now, that the boring part is over, here are some artsy-fartsy New York-ey pictures.




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Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! or My Lame Attempt at Turbo

Ok, so I have been without cable for three weeks. Something happened in the Cablevision hub down below. They should be able to fix the damn thing without me being there, right? Nope. I must be there. My sysadmin neighbor had the same problem. He made an appointment, which was promptly missed by the cable guy. On the second try his service was restored, but the technician did not do anything about my connection, even though he was told about it.

So I decided to find out the following: is it possible to have Cablevision fix my cable without me being there? Come on, cable is not important enough to take a day off from work, right? What if I can’t take a day off? What? What?

So I decided to “Turbo” (definitely click the link). That’s what a real pro of getting things out of customer service calls his art.

Well, I suck at it. I summoned level 2 support. Bampf + cloud of blue stinky smoke. No dice. I summoned a director of customer service (a director is located below VP in the corporate food chain. My boss is a director). Ca-bampfff + a cloud of stinky red smoke. No dice. I decided to give up and make an appointment. I guess I could work from home one day.

You see, with this amount of energy expended, I could get a satellite dish which would provide me with a better selection of channels, better picture quality and cheaper price. But I can’t. Dishes are banned from my apartment building.

Interestingly, the Cablevision director said that in the future Cablevision will have more channels than any dish network. I wanted to inquire about how they were gonna cram all of that bandwidth into coax, but I decided that it was enough smart assing for the day.

What worries me, is that I am starting to become more and more vocal about getting good customer service. I sympathize more with corporations that are loosing business because of idiocy of all levels of management in designing the customer experience, than with CRs. clerks and managers who have to endure my smart arse requests, arguments and refusal to take crap from them without even a half-hearted fight.

What is it? Am I becoming “just like the Americans” as that sleazeball realtor said?