Time Warner Cable – Digital Cablecard Install Part 3

My Time Warner Cable Experience in Austin, TX

My Time Warner Cable Experience in Austin

I have been delinquent in posting parts one and two of my quest for digital cablecards with Time Warner Cable here in Austin, TX…but, they weren’t very exciting anyway. Then again, part three really wasn’t very exciting, but things are looking better.

Cablecard Install Part I

Part One was actually an eye opener for me. I arrived in town on a Tuesday (I think, it is all a blur right now). I called TWC on Wednesday and ordered the triple-play (or whatever they call it here) bundle. The dude on the phone said they could have someone out some time the following week. I asked him if there was a way to do it sooner and he said he could have someone out tomorrow probably if I paid the first month with a credit card over the phone…DISCO.

Cablecard Install Part II

Part Two was the next day when a very nice, name undisclosed, installer showed up at the house. He is a super nice guy, but I am not sure he is playing with a full deck…and that is not to say that he was crazy, just that he might only be working with 4 of 8 cylinders. He only had multi-stream cards with him and my Hitachi plasma needs a single stream card and the ATI DCT (Digital Cable Tuner) that I have needs a single stream card as well.

It was cool because the reality is, the only piece of equipment I had was the plasma…the rest was scheduled to arrive the next day. I followed up with “the installer dude” the following week and that is when it got kind of crazy. I don’t want to disclose exactly what happened over a series of 4 phone calls, but suffice it to say that I was seriously considering calling up the main shop and telling them about what had transpired with “the installer dude.” Fortunately for us, he is on vacation now and I was re-scheduled for the following Tuesday (today) because as it turns out, they were out of single stream cablecards.

Cablecard Install Part III

Part Three kicks off with my phone call into TWC this morning to find out what my window was for the installer. It turns out they don’t use windows, they just give you a one hour “heads up” before the installer is going to be at your house. Well, I get a call from “the 2nd installer dude” today around 11:30am and he tells me that he is going to have to reschedule the install appointment until tomorrow because the only tuning adapters they have in the warehouse are refurbished and according to him, “they never seem to work right.” So, yeah, I don’t want those. We’ll see in Part 4 (aka: tomorrow) if they are going to have all of the equipment needed to make this install happen after 3 weeks.

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Tags: Austin, cablecard, HTPC, texas, time warner cable