New things, annoying like the old things
My parents are working at reducing their monthly bills while my father has no income. This week's episode: Cable. The cable bill came and was waaay too expensive, and it mentioned something about the whatever package going up in price by $3 per month. My parents realized, uh, we don't even *need* that package. So, off to the Xfinity store to talk about the bill, and not only did he succeed in lowering the bill, he came home with two new cable boxes to boot. These were for the downstairs TV and mom's room; mine, the super-basic box, was fine.
So. Dad was able to install mom's, no problem. The downstairs TV? Problem. He was in a chat room with some customer service person when I got home on Tuesday, super frustrated that he couldn't get it to work. They'd been at it for quite some time. Dad was about ready to take the box back to the store as defective when he decided to try something…and realized he'd put a cable into the wrong plug. Nice. So, it works just fine.
Yeah, well, of course that's subjective. It's one of the fancy boxes where he can speak something and it will attempt to find that for him. I'd just come home and mentioned a Maureen O'Hara movie to him (apparently it's tradition in my one coworker's family to watch The Quiet Man on St. Patrick's Day, and when I realized it had John Wayne *and* Maureen O'Hara, I knew dad knew the movie), so he tried saying her name. Up popped the movie Aquamarine, which was very confusing. He tried again and it worked. However, once mom got home, he tried a third time, and what it heard was "Marine O'Hara," which is how the mermaid movie came along. Aha. Enunciation is important. Still, dad doesn't like the idea of Alexa or any of that crap, so him using the voice thing could be short-lived.
I am not a fan of the new box. Granted, I've used the remote just once, but it wouldn't let me change the channel. I expect to type in the channel and it just goes. Whatever setting this was on, I typed in the channel and it showed me, okay, that's the Channel 9 HD channel. But it didn't take me there. It just showed a graphic on the screen that, hey, that's the number you typed in, and here are other similar channels in case you mistyped. I had to manually go between channels to get there. Also, do you remember a time when you would press the button and the channel would come on instantaneously? There was no pause, like it had to think about what it was doing? Man, that seems so long ago. I totally miss that. Digital had nothing on analog when it comes to that. And, well, it's getting worse. It took it several seconds to go, okay, here's Channel 9…and…voila! Yeah. Come on, just put the stupid channel on! Why is this hard? I am SO GLAD my box hasn't changed, because at least I'm used to that.
There's been one other change in my life this week, but I'll wait to discuss that until I hit a particular milestone in a few more days. It's another thing that annoys me. It doesn't take much, sure, but two things in one week really ruffles my feathers.
On the plus side, I hit 3000 days on the Wii. So at least I had one worthy milestone.
So. Dad was able to install mom's, no problem. The downstairs TV? Problem. He was in a chat room with some customer service person when I got home on Tuesday, super frustrated that he couldn't get it to work. They'd been at it for quite some time. Dad was about ready to take the box back to the store as defective when he decided to try something…and realized he'd put a cable into the wrong plug. Nice. So, it works just fine.
Yeah, well, of course that's subjective. It's one of the fancy boxes where he can speak something and it will attempt to find that for him. I'd just come home and mentioned a Maureen O'Hara movie to him (apparently it's tradition in my one coworker's family to watch The Quiet Man on St. Patrick's Day, and when I realized it had John Wayne *and* Maureen O'Hara, I knew dad knew the movie), so he tried saying her name. Up popped the movie Aquamarine, which was very confusing. He tried again and it worked. However, once mom got home, he tried a third time, and what it heard was "Marine O'Hara," which is how the mermaid movie came along. Aha. Enunciation is important. Still, dad doesn't like the idea of Alexa or any of that crap, so him using the voice thing could be short-lived.
I am not a fan of the new box. Granted, I've used the remote just once, but it wouldn't let me change the channel. I expect to type in the channel and it just goes. Whatever setting this was on, I typed in the channel and it showed me, okay, that's the Channel 9 HD channel. But it didn't take me there. It just showed a graphic on the screen that, hey, that's the number you typed in, and here are other similar channels in case you mistyped. I had to manually go between channels to get there. Also, do you remember a time when you would press the button and the channel would come on instantaneously? There was no pause, like it had to think about what it was doing? Man, that seems so long ago. I totally miss that. Digital had nothing on analog when it comes to that. And, well, it's getting worse. It took it several seconds to go, okay, here's Channel 9…and…voila! Yeah. Come on, just put the stupid channel on! Why is this hard? I am SO GLAD my box hasn't changed, because at least I'm used to that.
There's been one other change in my life this week, but I'll wait to discuss that until I hit a particular milestone in a few more days. It's another thing that annoys me. It doesn't take much, sure, but two things in one week really ruffles my feathers.
On the plus side, I hit 3000 days on the Wii. So at least I had one worthy milestone.