Super Bowl Sunday

It's Super Bowl Sunday morning and my daughter goes into the TV room to turn on a show.

The TV doesn't work. There's no video coming from the set-top box.

So I power cycle the set-top box to see if that fixes the problem. It doesn't. In fact, the box keeps power-cycling itself over and over again every three minutes.

So I call Verizon with six hours to go before kickoff. First, the automated voice sent down some signal and that didn't work. So after being put on hold for a while, I spoke to a human being who tried some other signals. They didn't work either.

And he said there was no way they could get somebody out to fix the problem before kickoff.

I demanded to speak with a supervisor. More waiting.

The supervisor told me that there were no techs available and that the best they could do in terms of compensation was to refund me a day of service. I replied that to lose service the day of the Super Bowl and then to have to wait around for half a day for a technician to arrive the next day required more than that. Especially in light of the fact that they would now be replacing my set-top box for the third time.

He gave me some number to call (which I haven't yet) where they could perhaps help me with that.

Stan the technician came out the next day and replaced the box.

So after reprogramming everything for the third time, things seem to be OK again.