The other day our television stopped working. There was no good reason for it. It simply up and stopped bringing us any programming. We had not done anything different; we had not touched the connections or done anything to the remote. It was an unnerving feeling because just a day or so before this, a friend who lives a few houses away had called to ask if we were having any problems with our cable service. At the time that he called, we weren’t, but now, here we were without TV, too.
I had been through this before, and in just about every case, the problem could be solved by the “unplug and plug in again” approach. So I unplugged the TV and cable box, waited a few seconds, plugged them in again, and, after the box rebooted, the TV screen displayed the same disheartening message: “Sorry. There is no connection to the Internet ….” It then went on to suggest that I check the coaxial cable connections, etc., etc., which I knew were fine.
So I tried unplugging and re-plugging the router, thinking that perhaps a glitch had occurred there. No go. The same message informing me that the TV and Internet had declared a vow of silence between them continued to be displayed. I should have known that the problem was not the router, since our phones and my computer were still working, but, hey, you try anything in the moment, right?
Having exhausted the few options I knew about for getting electronic stuff to work again, I called Xfinity. The tech had me jump through the same unplug/plug-in-again hoops. He sent a signal to our cable box to see if something had gone haywire in there. Everything seemed to check out. I ventured to ask if there might be something going on in our general area with the service. He assured me that nothing was showing up on his computer to indicate an outage of any kind in our area. Finally, he said I should make an appointment with a technician who could come to our house and check things out, which I did. The tech would be here in two days between 7:30 – 9:00 AM.
Here is where my mind gets a bit fuzzy, because there was another phone call. This time Xfinity called me to say that there was, indeed, an outage affecting cable service in our neighborhood. I should give them until about 2:30 that afternoon to have things up and running. If I was still having problems after that, give them a call again. Well, it was, in fact, later than 2:30 when TV service was restored, but by Monday evening, we were back in business. I called Xfinity and successfully canceled the tech appointment for the next morning.
My frustration here has to do with why I was required to go through all the motions of disconnecting/reconnecting my equipment when the problem was clearly not in my house. Was the representative on the phone so ill-trained as not to be able to see that there was an outage causing their service to be cut off to our neighborhood? I consider all the gyrations they put me through to be a complete waste of my time. I would much rather have had them tell me from the outset that there was a problem that they would have to fix – and it would take so-many hours – than to have them distract me with silly, useless “resets” that took time I could have used more productively.
I went to Xfinity, all right, and beyond. I should have been able to stay put and have them make things right from the beginning.