Here's yet another story about RCN's terrible service. I couldn't make this stuff up... It's definitely comedy show material.
We have premium service with RCN, and HDTV channels. To get to another channel, one must hit the "guide" button on the remote and enter the channel number. The problem is that the "guide" button doesn't work on any HDTV channel, so to get it to work, we must manually move 100 channels, one by one to a non-HDTV channel and only then will the "guide" button work.
I watched as my wife followed the instructions of the RCN service "professional":
An attempt to get the box to reboot:
(1) Turn off the cable box manually (do not use the remote) by pressing the power button. Now, with the cable box off, press and hold the menu button (!?) No surprise that no buttons responded with the cable box off.
(2) With the cable box on, press and hold the menu button. Didn't work.
(3) and only after that did he finally correctly tell her to press and hold the power button to get a reboot, which didn't fix the problem at all.
In fact, they don't have a fix for this problem, but told us that they'd need an hour of time to disable our cable box to fix the problem (?!) They still haven't yet fixed it.
Next service problem —
We want to watch boxing Saturday night on the InDemand channel. The Pay-per-view boxing match costs $49.99 on regular InDemand or $54.99 on High Definition. Both channels advertise that boxing starts at 8:30PM, but when we elect the $54.99 for High Definition we become aware that the show that we are now enabled to watch starts at 9:00PM with a "Pregame" show listed on the channel guide from 8:30PM to 9:00PM. The problem is that we're not able to watch the pre-game show at the High Definition price.
So, we call the service "professional" at RCN at 8:30PM. The service guy first tells us that there must be a problem with our converter box because the show is advertised as starting at 8:30PM. And he proceeds to give the instructions for a cable box reboot. Then, I tell the guy that the problem is not with the cable box, but rather that the cable guide shows an 8:30PM to 9:00PM time slot that we are not authorized to watch even though we paid for it and apparently are authorized to watch after 9:00PM (because the channel guide turns the time slot green when you're authorized). Well, it was very apparent to me that the service "professional" at the other end of the phone could not look at what I was looking at. He must not have had a TV in front of him (!) And he then told me that he understood the problem and had to call another department to seek an answer. Whereupon, he proceeded to put me on hold until 9:00PM when I could get access to the program. Even after 9:00PM, he never took me off hold, and so I just hung up.
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