The ups and downs of laser ownership.
WARNING: Rambling and ranting ahead. Read at the risk of losing time you could be spending doing other things!
As I noted in my last post, I was to be migrating to FiOS TV on 21-November. Well, first let me say that every person I've talked to on the phone with Verizon has been very nice and helpful. Even if they weren't able to help me get things resolved.
You'll notice there's a decidedly inclusive statement there. Every person. As you guys have demonstrated to be quite the smart bunch, you probably will have gathered that I've been on the phone with Verizon a number of times recently. So here is the first part of my frustrations with FiOS.
All was going well on the 21st. I had a scheduled time between 10-12 and they had informed that I would be called ~30 minutes before they showed up. As I was on vacation that day (and the subsequent week), I decided to see if I couldn't cut down on some of the installation steps they needed to go through by disconnecting our DirecTV boxes and getting the A/V rack in the living room setup for easy access.
I had been told that since I had FiOS Internet service already, the TV service install shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. They simply had to run cable from the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) to the exiting cable lines in the house then simply setup and then register their Set Top Boxes (STBs). Well, much to my chagrin, 15:00 rolled around and I had heard nary a word from the installer. So I called the lovely people at Verizon and asked where my installer was. I know those windows are rough estimates and that things can (and often) do creep up in other installs. Which is the reason I had waited until 15:00 to call. Three hours past my window is reasonable in my opinion.
The very helpful man on the other end of the phone apologized, and then placed me on hold in order to call the installer and find out what was going on. When he got back to me, he apologized again and said that the installer was about 90 minutes away from completion of the other job. My first (and biggest gripe really) is that I never got a call from the installer saying he was running behind.
I have another slight problem here and some of you can probably figure out what that may be, but I'll explain it later.
I wasn't happy with that result, but what can I do at this point. I fired up my Xbox 360 and started watching some episodes of 30 Rock over Netflix to keep me occupied. For some reason that was allowed to last for another 3 hours.
Yes, 18:00 rolled up on me and still nary a word from the installer. From being done with the previous job in 90 minutes to 3 hours passing and still not a word. Yup, at this point my patience was gone, I had been with DirecTV for 14 years and had never had anything close to this happen. This was the kind of service I expected from Comcast honestly, not Verizon. My FiOS Internet installation experience was awesome, end to end. The guys that came and did the service, their handling of my request during setup, the whole show was great.
Anyway, I called Verizon again at 18:00 and told them I no longer wanted any part of this, I had yet to cancel my DirecTV service and I'd be more than happy to carry on with them if this was how things were going to be handled. They were very apologetic and informed me that I would have to be transferred to my local billing office to cancel the order. Which they kindly did, or at least attempted to do... Yes, I was transferred only to find out that my local billing office closed at 18:00 PST, and would not be back open until Monday morning.
18:30 the installer called. He had the gall to call me and submit that he would be more than willing to come out and do the installation right now. By 22:00 he was finished with the install. Now let me be very clear here, the ONT was some 25' away from my existing cable feed to the house, we only had two STBs to be installed (which I did in about 5 minutes while he was outside, 2xPower Outlet + 2xHDMI = 2xDone).
All he had to do was run cable from the ONT to the existing line in to the house, then come inside and run their little registration application to log the boxes as live for service. That took nearly 3 hours.
So here's where the race condition comes in - After doing all the exterior work, he came in to register the boxes, which partially failed. The DVR STB had a partial registration, the other failed wholly. After another 30 minutes of retrying and resetting the boxes, he called their Technical Support center to find out...they had taken down the registration servers for maintenance. Meaning I had one box in my house that only got part of the programming package I had paid for, the other box wasn't functional and my multi-room DVR service was not functioning. The kid doing the install apologized ad nauseam. At this point I seriously just wanted my DirecTV back. But again, I'm a sucker for new technologies, and I was already on this boat floating down the river Styx, so might as well ride it out.
At this point the kid promised he would get the box registration done tomorrow morning first thing and I'd be up and running by the time I got up. Sure enough, he kept his promise on that one.
Now in my "playing" around with the STBs Saturday morning, I discovered that my multi-room DVR was not working. One of my reasons for moving to FiOS TV was so I could watch stuff recorded on the DVR in my bedroom with out needing to have another DVR. So I called my new friends at Verizon FiOS tech support. The lovely lady had me run through some of their STB menu items for her, then she showed me the super secret method to access the STBs diagnostic and installer menus. Everything in there checked out okay on both boxes. Which left her stumped. So she put me on hold to talk to the senior support person. Upon her return, I was informed that the two boxes the installer dropped off were incompatible. Yes, you read that right. So after hanging up and entering a fit of cursing, I decided to call back again. This CSR person was stumped as to why the previous person told me such a thing. So after he and I went through the same things, he asked me a few more questions and then told me they might actually BE incompatible. But he was asking a senior technical support person a few questions.
In the background I can hear the familiar noise of the MSN Messenger service. A few "mmm" and "ahhh"s later he informed me (via his contact over Messenger)that they WERE compatible, but for some inane reason the registration application he was using wasn't resetting the feature flag on the box, so he was going to use his super secret registration application to fix this. A scant 2 minutes later, it was working just fine. All was well in my house finally. It only took 18+ hours to get my FiOS TV installed and running 100%....well not really 100%.
So in deference to the one person who managed to read this far, I'll let you have a break before I start with the second Act. :)
Now, there's one thing in this that I'm sure some of you have picked up on, and I lightly called out previously. It's way back at the top of this babble; my installation window was set between 10-12. I would normally assume that I was 2nd or maybe 3rd on a list of work items for that person on that day. And my assumption here also was that none of those work tickets prior to mine would take more than a couple of hours.
According to the kid that did the install, every work ticket he got was setup between 10-12 and they stacked him up with 6 or 7 of them.
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
