Tired of Comcast’s perpetual outages and $93 monthly bill, I have finally dumped cable and gone to satellite. I did the research between DISH and DirecTV and didn’t really see much of a difference, but DirecTV was about $3 cheaper, and I don’t know anyone with DISH, so I went with DirecTV.

Problem #1 was trying to sign up on DTV’s website. After getting through the entire selection process, the thing bombed out on me and said to call an 800 number. Ok, called the 800 number and problem #2 began: Customer service rep could not spell “NULL” for the life of her. It goes like this:

Me: “N-U-L-L”

Her: “N-O-L-L?”

Me: “N-U-L-L”

Her: “N-E-U-L-L?”

Me: “No, it’s N-U-L-L”

She never successfully spelled it back to me, so I don’t know if she ever got it right. Problem #3 came when she checked my credit. I have impeccable credit and have never even carried a balance on a credit card — ever — so it came to some surprise when she said I would need to pay a $150 deposit for equipment and she would take $10 off my bill for the next 15 months to pay it back. Uh, no. After getting confirmation that there was an option for “good credit” people to not pay any deposit, I told her I wasn’t going to pay the deposit and that she should check again. She said that was that and, figuring that this company failed me three times in the last 10 minutes, it probably wasn’t going to be worth my while in the long haul. She couldn’t have cared less when I told her to cancel the whole thing.

I went to the DISH website, configured everything online in about 5 minutes, didn’t have to suffer through five minutes of “specials” I was being offered, and even scheduled the installation online — for next weekend, so I don’t even have to skip work.

Assuming the install guys come and the thing actually works, I’ll be mightily pleased.

PS Comcast sucks.