Eating Crow

How the mighty have fallen! No, I'm not talking about Verizon and Comcast. They seem to have weathered my assault on their respective fortresses without too much trouble. I am the vanquished heroine, forced to crawl back to Comcast after a tortured experience with Verizon DSL Internet and general grumbling from my summer guests that no TV would, in fact, be a problem.

So, I headed back to the local Comcast store and wondered briefly if they would give me a hard time for returning so soon. No worries. My account was still in a 'hold' category, which I bet Comcast secretly calls 'disloyal customers' with a note to never, ever offer them any deal again. Maybe they have a sense of humor and just label us  'gotcha'--they are pretty sure you'll be back. No slinking into the line required, just the usual pleasantries with the customer service rep, while she efficiently scanned what seemed to be massive amounts of equipment to self install. When I questioned why the 2nd TV receiver box was now bigger than the TV itself and had just one month ago been a 3 by 3 adapter box, she swapped the larger one out, scanned, rescanned and asked me to sign three different receipts. A nagging thought - was this going to be a problem?

"You're all set," she said.
"There are no cables in here," I responded, poking through the boxes.
"Oops-are your TVs HD or older?"
"Old, very old.."
"Here you go." She proceeded to toss in an impressive number of black cables.
"Thank you for choosing Comcast."
Hmmm..I mused on that word--choosing?! Was there a choice?

It's amazing how the equipment changed in just over 30 days.
Here's the handy bag of goodies I received:

Nice for grocery shopping later

The challenge of the easy self install begins:

Only one trip back to the Comcast store. Yup, the new receiver hadn't scanned correctly. A quick rescan and a bonus gift of longer cables thrown in to sweeten the deal.
"Thank you for choosing Comcast."  Again?!

At home: success!

But a few leftover parts: