Careful--It might become "self-aware"

So, last year my mom gets a letter in the mail from Time Warner saying that they are planning to "upgrade their signal to "digital" (right, I've heard that before), and as a result, that means that they are going to cut channels from our existing lineup if we do not order these extra boxes. Now, granted, they sent us this letter MONTHS before the deadline came, but apparently it takes me that long to study up on a product before I decide to order it.

Needless to say, the day of said deadline came and went, and the most important channel that we lost was 'The Weather Channel'. Well, at this point, neither of us are exactly "pleased" at this point, but those are the breaks.

Flash forward to November 12th of last year: so, Mom and I decide to go ahead and order these "digital adapters" that are mentioned in the above letter. We go online (and fortunately I have the website bookmarked--thank you Google Chrome!) and order them, and finally we print our confirmation. Now the waiting begins.

Finally, about 3 days later (not too bad, since most shipping estimates are two weeks are more--one of the FEW advantages of living in Dayton, Ohio) our adapters come. I open the box they are shipped in, and in the box are two adapters, two remotes, two pairs of batteries, two HDMI cables, two coax TV cables, two a/c adapters, instructions for both remotes, and a single set of directions on how to set up our equipment. Fine. I unpack the boxes, (hence, the content description), hook everything up, and call the toll-free number listed in the instruction booklet, and everything is set up perfectly!

Now, I know what you're thinking, but no, my story doesn't end there. As it turns out, there's a reason that they have you call that number. Unlike a cable modem, you cannot change TVs on a digital adapter whenever you please. I found this out the hard way, which I will get to later. Anyway, on November 30th, which happened to be the day of "The Game" (OSU v. TTUN), our cable went out, and we had to have a technician come out and have our signal reconnected. I had JUST got Windows 7 at the time, and it was having issues recognizing my TV tuner anyway, but that seemed to be beside the point. At the time we had resulted to listening to in on 1410 AM, but then the cable got fixed, so we tuned in to ABC and watched the rest of it there.

Anyway, back to how this thing works: apparently, once you connect the box and call the number, the box has to stay on that TV. For me, I think that stinks, because I've grown quite accustomed to the "plug and play" nature of hardware like the Wii U and Roku. I've already had to send out one of their technicians ONCE because of a signal outage (see previous paragraph), so I was not about to call them again because of something I did. So, now we're stuck with only 1 TV with a "working" signal, and my box is just sitting there connected to an anolog TV giving me the "terminator" look with it's red blinking light. Oh well. At least we have one TV with a working signal in the house.

So, on that note: did any of my readers hear about the Time Warner-Comcast merger? Sounds like a winner in my book:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57618841-93/comcast-time-warner-cable-to-unite-in-$45.2b-merger/