Happy non-specific winter celebration greetings!
Right, it's a little bit late but I don't care. I could backdate the post if I wanted to look good, but I'm too lazy.
So what happened over the holiday period? Well we moved house for one thing. Thankfully it was relatively painless. Especially for me, since the band had an event audition the day we were due to move, so I spent the day mainly on a train and sitting about while my girlfriend, mother and brother shifted the house contents.
The new place is great. It's absolutely massive, has a marble floor entry hall, stained glass windows (although I think they're actually perspex) and is about twice the size of our old place. Sorted.
But this post is all about the saga we had trying to get the Sky+ reinstalled. Bloody hell. So here goes.
When we moved, I called up Sky and they arranged an engineer appointment. After messing up our address and giving them a house number somewhere down the other end of the street, they eventually got to us thanks to me jumping out onto the road in front of their van.
Now there's scaffolding up around our house right now, because there's a new roof being fitted. After messing around for a while, poking around and talking on mobile phones for about 15 minutes, they decided that the scaffolding was blocking the signal to the dish and when the scaffolding came down the TV would be working. I wasn't convinced.
I called up our landlady and asked if she knew how long the scaffolding was likely to be up, and she said to speak to the builders the next time they were round, which I did. He said it'd probably be a few weeks, maybe less if the weather stayed dry. There's a second dish on the house feeding the upper flat, but they told us that one wasn't working. Now with the Xmas TV schedule approaching we decided this sucked. But when we looked at our dish, we couldn't work out how the signal could be getting blocked by the scaffolding the way it was.
We spoke to the upstairs neighbours and asked them if they were getting a reception, since that dish was right behind about 6 pipes. Yes they were, and they were watching it right then.
"..." I said, and called Sky again.
After a lengthy discussion, they gave me the engineer company's number and I called them up. The guy I spoke to said it sounded odd to him too so he'd send someone out and they'd call me so I could come back from work (a 5 minute walk) to give them access.
A couple of days pass, no engineer. I call up again, get told he's coming soon, same old same old. Eventually speak to someone who says they did the job while we were out. A little weird, but okay. It's not like they needed into the house anyway. He said "our" dish wasn't working, but he connected it to the neighbour's dish which we already knew was working.
So we use our Sky+ but soon find out it's failing on some recordings. We work out it's when we try to record two things at once, or record one thing while watching another. Stef says she bets they only connected one feed rather than the two that the Sky+ needs. I fetch the phone.
So I spoke to the engineer company again, and tell them the job was only half done. I tell them what we think has happened and eventually a guy comes out to take a look. Judging by what he said on the phone, he's a fairly senior guy at the company. I show him round the house, he doesn't think it's reasonable that the scaffolding is blocking the dish either. He climbs up, gets some cable and starts messing about with something. Five minutes later he knocks the door and says he's done.
You know what the problem was? Our dish just wasn't aligned properly. It's working perfectly, just that the lazy bastards from the first night didn't bother to actually do any damn work! So now we have one feed on the neighbour's dish and one on our own and it's working perfectly, like it should've been from the start. But no way in hell do I want those engineers coming out again. I'd have a better chance of fixing it myself.
And then there was the net connection...
Actually that went live on the date they said, although our speed is fluctuating wildly and has been everywhere from 13mb/s right down to a barely-better-than-dial-up 9kb/s. Hopefully it'll balance out soon.
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