Eye Of The Storm

Well, it has been a series of wild days for me. Let’s start back all the way to last Friday. I come home from an exhausting week at work and all I wanted to do is let the Satellite dish wash over me in a sea of bad TV. So, I sit down on the couch turn on TV and nothing. Now sometimes I need to re-boot my receiver to get it back up. So, I did that and nothing. It did not re-boot. I unplugged it and re-plugged and still nothing.

So, I picked up the phone and called Dish Network. After having to navigate through ten minutes of automated bullshit I actually got to finally speak to a real human being. He talked me through all of the troubleshooting steps. (Which, I had already tried.) After he had me do some nonsense like making sure the TV was on channel three, I put it to him bluntly. I know the receiver is bad. Just send me a new one. He told me he would and that it would not be there until Monday. After complaining about that, he basically told me to go piss up a flag pole. So, I was going to be without TV until Monday.

So, Saturday came and I did my usual which consists of running errands and do some outdoor housework. I have a TV in the garage that runs on Rabbit ears so I was able to watch the Cub game out there. I waited for Joyce to get home and we went out to dinner. All in all it was a pretty uneventful day.

Sunday came and I went to watch the noon football games at Game Time in Palos Heights. After the games were over I went home and spent some time with Joyce before I went out again to watch the Bears game. I met up with some friends at Paddy Whackers a new bar that opened up on 87^th in Burbank. The Bears looked great and kicked Seattle’s ass. The bar however really sucks to watch football. They put out some food for halftime. I started with the most watered down chili known to modern man. That would be the highlight of the food. They had some over cooked pasta, cold chicken and the blandest Italian beef that I have ever had. They also had a band playing at half-time which was not needed. Still, with that said, with the way the Bears looked I still left in a good mood. I went home took out the garbage and went to bed. Sadly, I forgot to set my alarm before I passed out.

By, the time I woke up I knew I was screwed. Fortunately with my job I have the option to work from home. At the bar Sunday night I knew this and was leaning to working from home anyway. But, after not getting up until 8:30 my choice was made for me. So, I logged in remotely and took care of some stuff. I then realized that I had not yet received that receiver for my dish. So, I called Dish Network again. This time I asked to speak to a supervisor. She told me that she did not see an order for me and that she could send me out one but that it would again take three days. I told her to ship one overnight as I was beginning to lose my patience. She said she would but it would cost $29 bucks. I protested and after some haggling she agreed to waive the cost. I then asked here to credit my account from Friday since I hadn’t been able to use their product. She then told me to she could not do both. I would have to choose between the cost of the shipping or the credit for non-service. I was pissed but what could I do.

Joyce and I went out that evening and got home and it was really raining. Lightning was pouring down everywhere. We lost power for about 20 minutes. When the power came back on I looked outside and saw the damage. Here is exactly what the front of my house looked like the next morning.

I took off Tuesday to deal with everything. We were lucky in that when the tree fell it landed perfectly between both our cars. I had a ton of fallen branches laying everywhere and I gathered them up and put them in front of the house for pickup. We also had some damage to a gutter and a piece of aluminum came loose. So I spent most of my day yesterday dealing with all of that. I also decided that since Dish Network didn’t really value a consumer who has been a loyal customer for over two years that maybe I should just switch to DIRECTV. So, I did just that and called Dish Network to cancel. There, I had more smoke blown up my ass then if I was sitting on a locomotive. Still, I decided that if they just would have rectified the thing on Monday I would have never cancelled. So I stuck to my guns and went with Direct TV. Needless to say it has been a harrowing five days.