turned on the tv to watch a replay of the aus f1 gp qualifying on saturday afternoon. got about half way through and the tv flicked off and went black. “no. fuck.” says i, bearing in mind that our current tv service was thanks to a 1 month free trial in our building. “don’t tell me the trial’s ended half way through what i want to watch.” but evidently not. after going black for about a minute, up pops the upc logo from friday night and around 30 seconds later, our brand new digital telly service is up and running. it’s a bit of a mystery exactly what happened, since we hadn’t been back to the shop to get them to fix anything up, and i’d also turned off the digital box before going to bed the night before. my only guess is that given the service is also connected to upc via modem, perhaps they can power up the box remotely when they enable the service. i sure as shit didn’t do it.
anyways. everything’s working now, and as you might expect, even with 45 channels, there’s still nothing on.
detsamma; “the same”. what it seems internet and cable companies must be the world over. we signed up with upc for broadband and digital television this afternoon. it was all a bit tricky trying to follow the installation instructions in swedish, but after staring at the booklet for a while, everything seemed to come together okay.
the internet side of things is working (obviously) and we sat down to stare at the blue upc branded screen we were told would appear while our digital box and the upc system spoke to eachother to set up details of our service. a screen, we were told, that we could potentially be staring at for around an hour before anything exciting happened.
around an hour and a half later, still nothing. we call upc support, because we had been advised that sometimes it can take a while for them to activate the service and you can call and request that they turn it on then and there. not the problem apparently. evidently, even though i have in my hot little hand an invoice generated by the upc system, with a customer number on it, the shop where we signed up has not entered us into the system as a tv customer, just internet. i’m not entirely sure how that’s possible, given the details of the invoice i have, but in any case, we have to go back to the shop tomorrow some time and ask them to try again and i wasted several hours on a friday night that could have been spent doing other things.
god bless cable companies, wherever they are.
