Halloween Candy Giveaway

I had no television service all day yesterday, and I didn’t die.

It was so quiet without the television to keep me company that I thought I might die, but I survived by heading down to the Community Room to observe Pizza Tuesday.

We had a cute little costumed visitor spending time with her grannie.

I didn’t stay long in the Community Room because others indicated they too had technical issues with their television sets, but that service had been restored with a simple unplugging and reconnecting.

Of course, I’d already gone through that process several times, with no results, but I thought to head back and give it another go.

No amount of disconnecting/reconnecting, running of online troubleshooting tools, factory resetting brought the television back to life and it looks like I’ll have no service today either.

Putting in a call for a technician yesterday only resulted in being told “There’s an outage in your area. We’ll call you”. 

I did get a call that everything was A-Okay around 4:00, but everything wasn’t A-Okay.

I call again and get “I am showing that there was an issue with the node that cable services are connected for some customers where the cable boxes are getting error messages. We’ll call you”.

Though I do enjoy quiet meditation, can actually sit for hours in group settings, I wasn’t prepared for the all-day silence of no television in the background, so I went down to see how the seniors were doing with the candy giveaway.

The seniors had a nice little table set up outside the complex, with quite a few resident volunteers and music.

Didn’t see signs of any children but, a few minutes later, a family walking past our building, with two little trick-or-treaters, undoubtedly heading for the posh community behind us, stopped by.

That was it with children walking in this direction, but a dad drove into the complex, bringing his kids for grandma to see their costumes.

After that, one of the residents -- dressed as a butterfly, decided to do some creative street advertising.

I couldn’t believe that it worked.

Parents driving by, headed to parts unknown with their costumed children, pulled in.

We never got a lot of little trick or treaters, but what we did get seemed gratifying for the seniors.

As for the saga of the non-functioning television, in the back of my mind I’m thinking the outage may have caused the television to no longer function properly, but I can’t be sure of that and make arrangements to return it until a cable technician comes out and verifies it’s not their equipment.

And since customer service keeps telling me it’s an outage, won’t send a technician, I posted a complaint through the cable provider’s facebook page messenger that I find it difficult to believe that out of 178 units I’m the only one without service and asked why is it so difficult to make an appointment for a technician.

Believe it or not, that got instant results with a reply, “I do not see any area issues being reported at this time. Have you tried the troubleshooting steps”.

So, the continuing outage was a big fat customer servicing with a lie and, as for the standard company line of annoying me with, yet again, instructions to troubleshoot, my reply was, “OH NO, NOT AGAIN! JUST PLEASE SEND A TECHNICIAN!”

The saga continues.