Bless me cable for I have sinned. I have subscribed to DirecTV. While you rightfully may be thinking in terms of heresy, hypocrisy or worse, hold on a minute and let me explain. Besides, by the time you finish reading this column, you may want to use it in your marketing kit.
As much as I'd like to chalk this up to some Machiavellian plan of espionage (?I need to see what the competition is doing?), the reason I've gone over to the dark side is simple. I live in Bergen County in New Jersey. My cable operator is Cablevision, which acquired the system from AT&T back in the late '90s. It's what old-timers will remember as a UA Columbia plant, later owned by TCI, then acquired by AT&T. The upshot is that it has been undergoing some form of rebuild since the 1980s and is still limited-capacity analog. Which was fine until I took this job. Fact is, I need to see what's on the digital cable tier. (I did, however, maintain cable service, and no, I am not a Yankees fan.)
This is where the story begins. We (the family) went to buy the dish at a nearby Best Buy. There was a special that offered two receivers and the dish for what would amount to something like $35 after all the rebates. Fine, I said, we'll take it. Problem was, the guy really didn't want to sell it to us (I guess there's not much commission on these things, but there is a whole lot of paperwork). He made us wait for about a half-hour, then relented. We did the paperwork, and he told us the installer would be contacting us the following week. And the installer, an outfit called LG Enterprises, indeed did. They would be there first thing Monday morning. Good!
Of course, they weren't, and I had to get to work. I'd done my homework, though. I broke out my hand-bearing compass and my sextant, got a fix on the satellite and found a spot in the garden right outside the back door in which the dish could be located. I left strict instructions with my wife that that was the place I wanted it put. By the time I arrived at my office in New York, I'd had two calls from my wife, who was muttering something about the leafy nature of our neighborhood and a 12-foot mast. I got her on the phone, and, sure enough, the guy ? and the mast ? were on my roof. Two, three more frantic calls. There's a rat's nest of wires hanging from the wall phone in the kitchen. He refuses to hook up the satellite receiver's antenna input to our cable service. And when it comes time to turn the thing on, the guy has my wife call the DirecTV help line while he makes for the door and vanishes ? after, of course, accepting a check made out to ?cash? for $160 for the 12-foot mast and a wireless phone connection (a.k.a. the rat's nest of wires). I arrived home to find several neighbors gazing in wonderment at my new roofline.
I went inside and turned on the system. The picture was no better than my analog cable, and my surround sound system sounded more like it was surrounded ? by water. I investigated and found that the installer had simply run this beautiful RG-6 cable from the roof into the basement, where he'd disconnected the cable line and patched into lines leading to two of our four TV sets. RG-6 into Kmart ?blue light? coax. Moreover, he'd unplugged the coax from the VCR and hooked it up to the satellite receiver, bypassing the audio/video processor and creating a loopback in the audio circuit of the TV.
I broke out the instruction book and realized that the S-video and audio cables that were supposed to be packed with the receivers and dish had somehow vanished. I went to Radio Shack, spent another $50 replacing the cables, and after an hour or so of rewiring, I had everything working as it should (though I still need to replace the cheap coax and rehook cable service to the antenna jack on the satellite receiver).
I still have one problem, though. Every time I hit the ?Sat? button on the remote, the TV switches to channel 54, which, of course, yields nothing but snow. So far, I have not been able to figure this out. But the snow will serve me well come the holidays, when I plan to haul my sorry self up on the roof and do a Chevy Chase decorating job on the dish. Yup, I can hear the caroling neighbors now: ?Star of wonder, star of night?.?
Shink!
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