Got home from work yesterday, and was settling down to do a little bit of work on the computer, so I flipped on the television to catch some Simpsons. Hm... "Station not available", ok... go up a channel, and then down a channel. Still nothing. Alright, no problem, I've had issues with my DirecTV reciever before from time to time... just turn it off, unplug it, pull the "access card":http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/04/directv_hacking.html, wait a few minutes and then plug everything back in. That's odd... that didn't fix it, and I'm not even getting the time set on my receiver. Maybe my cats finally chewed through the sat line coming out of the wall. The one cat loooves to chew on things, and the nice soft rubber coating around the speaker wires seems to suit his fancy. Move the TV away from the wall... doesn't look any worse than from before. Lemme look on "TiVo":http://feralboy.com/matt/tivo/ to see when it died. Ok, recorded Conan at noon, that worked ok. X-Files at 4? Nope. So, that means whatever happened happened between noon and 4. The storms last night didn't start until after I got home, so that wasn't it. Last thing, I went to go look down in the basement at the wiring junction box.

A little bit of background. About 3 years ago, right after I had moved into my current building, I wanted to get a dish on the roof. I had had one at the house I was at before, and I liked having NYC local news, a) because it reminded me more of home, and b) because Pittsburgh local news is crap! I checked with the building owner, and he said no problem.

The guys from the "home theatre shop":http://www.dvpgh.com/dvsite/ where I had bought all my stuff came out to help me install my new "HD-capable receiver":http://www.audioreview.com/PRD_126691_2720crx.aspx. They got the dish and the OTA(Over The Air) antenna installed on the roof just fine, but the issue came where they tried to figure out how to run the lines into my apartment. My building is an old converted schoolhouse, with stone walls that are about a foot thick, and not very good for drilling through. Luckily, all the apartments were pre-wired for cable. There is a junction box in the basement, where the main cable feed comes in from the street, and then there are two lines which run off to each apartment, which is clearly labeled with the apartment number. I called the cable company (I forget who it was at the time, but they were bought by "Comcast":http://www.comcast.com/ about a year or so ago, but we'll get to that), and they told me that althought it was all their wiring, their responsibility for it ended at the street, so if the building owner was ok with it, I could do anything I wanted in the box.

Problem was, there was a padlock on the wiring box. The cable company rep said they couldn't get anyone out there to open it for at least a week, which did me no good since the guys from the home theatre shop were there right then. So, they snipped the metal ring which the padlock was locked into, bent the right _just_ enough to get the lock out, and we were in. The wiring was fairly complex, as there were only two lines running to each apartment's wiring plate, and I had 2 lines coming from the dish, and one coming from the OTA(Over The Air) antenna. I'm not quite sure about all the ins and outs, but a bunch of line splitters and new connects later, and a splitter in my apartment, and we were up and running. I had two sat lines; one for the "dedicated" sat receiver (which has since died), and one for the newer receiver, so I could watch something other than what TiVo was recording, and the antenna line for the local channel HD(High Definition) broadcasts. And Matt saw that it was good.

Back to last night. I go downstairs, and in the basement I find that all my carefully spliced and split and joined coaxial cables are sitting in a bag on the floor next to the junction box! Plus, the line going to my apartment has been pulled outside the junction box, and there's a new single splice in there! What the fuck? I look inside the box, and there's new little plastic "Comcast" tags on all the apt. lines in there. So, my guess was that someone was having line problems (in this day and age of digital cable, when you want HBO, you don't have to send someone out to pull the little CO2 cartridge-shaped line filter off of your line (like my old roomate Tom did when he stole cable back in college), you just type some keys in the central office, so it makes sense that nobody had been physically there all that time), and the tech came, saw my splices and figured I was stealing cable and cut everything.

Oh, I was hot. Not just because it was hot in my apartment and I had been messing around over even hotter electronics equipment, but because I was _pissed_. I got on the phone to Comcast's customer service (it's interesting to try and talk to someone and explain to them you don't have an account with them, but they still need to help you), talked to one guy, tried to find out if they knew of anyone actually _being_ at my building that day, asked for his supervisor, and finally got to a nice guy, also named Matt. He apologized profusely, and said that when a field tech runs into something like that, they're supposed to call a supervisor and follow this whole procedure, which I guess they didn't.

Bottom line is the local supervisor is supposed to call me today so we can figure out what happened. Then, either Comcast is going to send someone over to try and rewire everything, or if they can't I can get my original installers to come out and do it, and they can bill Comcast directly for the work. I'm hoping this will be relatively painless, but I have a feeling it won't, especially when I send Comcast a bill for a prorated amount of my DirecTV service that I lose until somebody fixes it. I'll keep you posted.

*Update #1:* Hey, how about that? I actually got a call from the tech; they're heading over to my building now to put it back on how it was. I can't leave work to go test it in my apt. after they're done, but if it doesn't work, they'll come back out again when I can actually test it.

*Update #2:* Wow, they fixed it! I have to say I'm impressed with how quickly and professionally they handled it.