I believe I left off on Friday evening with the installer promising to return.

Well. He never made it. We had the football game early on Saturday, so I called him when we got home. He was completely on the other side of town and said he’d try to make it again. I explained my patience was running thin and he apologized, but in a way that kind of said, “I’m doing what I can…deal”

So by Saturday evening I’d finally had enough. We called AT&T’s 800 support number. They were extremely polite and as helpful as they could possibly be. It did turn out that the system wasn’t showing us as having those additional boxes. I got pushed to Tier 2 support and spoke with Jesus. (not literally Christ himself, but a hispanic fellow)

Again, great service and as helpful as can be. He confirmed the problem in the system and fixed it, but the boxes still didn’t work. The soonest they could get a tech out was Monday the 29th between 2pm and 4pm.

In total we were on the phone about 3 hours with AT&T support and they did everything they could. I was impressed, but still without TV.

So we lived the rest of Saturday and Sunday without TV except for the big one.

Cut to Monday at 2pm on the nose and the doorbell rings. I open it to find the original installer. I asked if they’d sent him or he came on his own and he was like, “I told you I’d get out here as soon as I could.” I explained that another tech was on his way.

The original dude went through all the processes again. Doubled checked connections. Ran tests. Tried things three times. Finally the other tech showed up and they’re both running in and out of the house all around looking at cables and wires, hooking up different gadgets, taking readings.

Finally after an hour of this, they walk in an inform me that the only thing it can be is a bad RG (residential gateway). For the uninformed the RG is the centerpiece of the whole system. The line in feeds to it and from there everything (TV, internet, phone) feeds off of it. Kind of a router for your home. This didn’t make much sense to me as the big TV and the internet have worked fins since day 1, but they swapped it out.

As soon as it booted and the bug TV was up again, we went upstairs and booted the other TV’s. A few minutes later and…

…everything was working.

The original dude just looked at me with a look that clearly said, “Motherfucker!” without saying a word. All of this time and hassle and all it was was a bad RG. It was as simple as swapping out one piece and connecting 3 cables and everything worked.

So the story has a happy ending.

After a week of kinda-service I have to say I can’t think of a thing that really bothers me about the service. My TV looks awesome, the channel selection is much better than Time Warner, my internet is just as fast down and three times faster up (nice for uploading pics to coasterimage) and the kids now have converter boxes and get the whole range of channels instead of the basics like we did with TW. On top of all of this, the monthly bill will be less than it used to be.

Now I can finish watching the Steelers suck it in crisp HD.