It Was One of Those Days

My head is full today. Mostly full of anger and frustration at my DVR and the cable company which provides it. But also full of thoughts about prejudice, sterotyping, theories of the origin of the universe, hot dogs, and enchilada sauce (with rice and pork).

Let me rant about that DVR and the cable company...

A couple of days ago, the DVR decided it would just shut down. It does this on its own from time to time. Often it is done by the cable company. A "reboot" of the box after doing some update to the software that runs it. It is, after all, just a computer. It records and stores programs on a hard disk, among other functions. So, it is annoying when a reboot happens. Especially annoying since that wipes out the guide and the re-population of said guide takes many hours, sometimes days. So I wasn't upset when it happened on Tuesday. What upset me was that it did it 3 times... starting at about 4 PM. An hour before our local cable office closes for the night. This was odd behavior and suggestive of a problem with the box itself. So I called the cable company.


As I complained about the problem and made the alleged technician aware of my frustration and distrust of the DVR (my third one in two years), the problem seemingly stopped. The tech scheduled a service call for Thursday. A little later I got an automated survey call from the cable company, asking me questions regarding my call to support. Apparently, my answers triggered an escalation of my complaint because the next afternoon  I received a call from a tech at a higher level (tier 2?) support group who wanted to discuss the problem I was having.

This tech suggested that the problem was caused by some issues with the TV signal the box was receiving and that they had "made some adjustments" which should clean it up. Since it had not experienced a problem since the day before, it appeared that had cleared up the problem. We agreed to cancel the service call.

So, this morning (Thursday), I sat in my recliner and proceeded to watch the programs I had recorded the night before. The first one went fine, no problems. The second one was about halfway done when the box shut off again. It did not reboot. I waited a good 60 seconds and unplugged it and plugged it back in. It started back up. After it was restored to service, I restarted the recorded program I had been watching. Within 15 seconds, the DVR shut down and rebooted. And then again as I went to start the recorded program again. And then again after trying to restart that recorded program. So, this time after it rebooted I decided I would try a different recorded program and this time it went through without a hitch. I then went back to the one which seemed to trigger reboots and found it worked fine... I was ready to just delete that recording if the reboot happened again.

Go figure. I'll be at the golf course today, at least I understand that frustration and who causes it.