I don’t normally use this space to grind my personal axes, but give me a minute.

You know how local TV and radio commercials often feature businesses that claim to be “committed to excellence”? Didn’t that always strike you as weird? Well of course they’re committed to excellence. Nobody commits to doing a shit job.

But I wonder about Comcast.

Helping a friend to hook up a Digital-to-Analog converter (not a digital cable box – I’ve explained this a million times to others, and nobody knows what I’m talking about, so I won’t get into it here); basically, you can think of these things as slightly more advanced versions of the old red LED cable boxes of yore.

Connecting them up was a breeze, hardware-wise. Just plug in the cables and that was it. Except…

For some reason, you have to call a number or go on to a website to activate the blasted things. And that’s when things got hairy. Again, I won’t go into details because I’m thoroughly too pissed off to give it to you straight. Basically, the process is broken, the support was practically non-existent, and it’s so fucking pointless.

If someone wanders off with one of these things, what damage are they going to do exactly? If someone’s stealing cable, okay fine, they won’t get the newly converted digital basic channels. But, since they can’t even get one of these converters without an account, why all the high security after you get one?