So I thought that our problems with Bright House had been solved.

To bring you up to speed, @mmagnolia22 and I recently moved up the street and had to have our Bright House service moved with us. They sent an installer to our new address 7 days after we moved. Completely acceptable, if I didn’t work in television and didn’t need the Internet to do my job.

The installer showed up, with an HD cable box in hand. He hooked everything up; I thought we had success. No picture. No signal. Nothing.

After another hour of him looking at splitters in the wall and talking to Bright House dispatchers, he told us he would have to have another installer come out when we could get access to the basement apartment. Great, now we have to disturb one of our new neighbors we don’t even know.

I schedule another appointment with Bright House.

It’s going to take 9 more days to get someone out to our apartment.

I complain.

My complaints on Twitter don’t go unheard, as I receive an e-mail from someone at Bright House. They offer to move up our install time. At this point I had already made it through the weekend without television. So, what were 5 more days when I would be at work?

Bright House sends out another installer. He finds that the line from the curb runs under all four units and in to the basement unit beneath us. The splitter is located in that apartment, and it wasn’t even hooked up. He puts the lines together. Tada!.

But wait. What about the Internet?

The tech didn’t realize we needed Internet as well, even though I showed him where the cable modem was when he arrived. So, he tried to the modem working. Nothing. He can’t get it to “lock down” with the rest of the system. Bright House dispatch sends him out to the curb and has him run a cable from the corner the whole way around the building up to our unit. Look at that, Internet works. Apparently, the signal isn’t strong enough for TWO TELEVISIONS AND A CABLE MODEM. He hooks up two two-way splitters to the cable running in to our unit. The first splitter goes to the cable modem and the second splitter, the second splitter then runs to both televisions.

Great, everything finally works. I can watch television and surf the Internet, no problem.

A week later, @mmagnolia22 says, “Have you been able to get our On-Demand channels to work? I keep getting ‘Error: 106.’”

Damn.

She calls Bright House, they have no idea what an “Error: 106″ is, but they’ll send a technician out. She also lets them know that they’ve had our address wrong since we moved here. They have it listed as Apt. C instead of Apt. B. Bright House says to change that address, they’ll have to cancel and disconnect our service and send another technician out to reconnect the service. I guess we’ll stay as Apt. C.

@mmagnolia22 takes care of everything this time, because it was a day I had to go to work early.

When I get home, she tells me that the installer they sent out that day said, “I don’t even see how you can get signal. You’re going to have to rerun every cable in the unit. I’ll schedule another installer to come out.”

What… the… hell?!

The technician sounded just like Keith David.

So, another installer came out this past Tuesday. The same installer from the second Bright House visit (we’re up to four now). He says the other technician was feeding us a line of bull, and there is no reason to rerun all of the cables.

Bright House still has no idea what “Error: 106″ means and this installer has no clue either, because he doesn’t have a cable box at home. [On a side note, I don't have an edit bay at home, but I know how it works because I use it every day at WORK.]

So, Bright House has him run another line from the curb to our unit, and amazingly the On-Demand channels work.

He runs a line from the basement unit, up to our unit, and On-Demand still works!

In our neighbor’s apartment, he then proceeds to disconnect the other three lines coming off the splitter, leaving ours the only one in tact.

On-Demand still works! Internet works! Regular cable channels work! It’s amazing.

Until Friday.

@mmagnolia22 watched television at 6:00am, everything worked fine.

I got up and went to watch television at 11:00am, and nothing worked. No television. No Internet. Nothing.

I called Bright House this morning. “We can have a technician out to you Wednesday afternoon.” What?! I inform the voice on the other end that we both work, and need a morning appointment (because without a job, we can’t pay for their awful service). “Well, then the earliest would be Thursday morning.” Fine. Whatever.

No idea where the problem came from. No idea about what the problem even is.

All I know, is that this will be five visits from a technician in two months, and I don’t think I want that many problems in the future.

Oh, satellite? What can you offer me?

I love my HDTV. There’s no question about that. I opt to watch all of the broadcasts stations on their digital channel, even if the program is provided in HD. The quality of the digital signal is far superior to the analog signal

So, I’m always looking for HD content to enjoy. Discovery, HD Theater, History Channel or even AMC- wait, we don’t get AMC HD? But we get HGTV HD? And TNT HD? Plus A&E HD? Even MTV HD?! What the hell? I wanted to watch Mad Men in HD; it must look FANTASTIC!

So, I decided to ask my cable company what the chances were of receiving AMC HD. Here was my question:

What are the chances of having AMC HD added to the Bright House channel lineup?

Here was the form letter I received back:

Thank you for taking the time to email XXXXX. Our goal at XXXXX is customer satisfaction and we are interested in our customer’s feedback. … We do not want to charge all our customers for “specialty” programming but still want to be able to provide High Definition programming and remain competitive. We look forward to offering more High Definition channels very soon.

Thank you for that boring and mind-numbing form letter. I would like to get back the time it took me to read that e-mail. Please send a check at your earliest convenience.

All I needed to know was, “the chances are about the same as President G. W. Bush’s library containing more than old copies of Boys Life magazine.

I’ve seen the commercials hundreds of times. I know I’ve never wanted one. It doesn’t matter what product, I might say “that’s cool” or “that’s interesting,” but really I’m thinking “what would I do with that crap?”

Except maybe the Shamwow. Though the host of their commercials freaks me out more than a little bit.

I mean, what am I going to do with the Hercules Hook? I don’t think I have 150 lbs. of stuff to hang from a hook. My fingers are still able to move enough that I don’t need the Clever Clasp. And I don’t have enough people to spy on to warrant buying the Listen Up.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is how desperate the manufacturers of these products have gotten. I don’t remember what product was being peddled earlier this evening, but they had the best payment plan of all-time. I might consider buying it, just because of the “deal” I would receive.

2 easy payments of $9.99

It can’t get much better than that, I guess.