Bang Head Here

So today I went in for round two of me vs. the idiots at Cogeco.

Like I said yesterday, we got our digital cable box yesterday and it's pretty sweet. House and the Rick Mercer Report in HD are gorgeous and it's nice to have G4 to toss on the telly whenever there's nothing else to watch.

That said, I was a little disconcerted yesterday when I realized that my VCR will only tape whatever is on the receiver. Ie. I can't set it to tape Corner Gas and then watch Prison Break at the same time. So I decided to call Cogeco up and see if there was a way to go around this or if I could just plug my cable directly into the VCR and have a separate feed to the digital box (which looks to be the way to go).

These guys are idiots. I'm sorry, but I can't say it any nicer than that. I asked the guy in the sales/accounts office if he knew of a workaround and he thought there might be one so he tossed me over to the tech department. Fine. I can understand the guys in the sales office not knowing what to do.

The guy in tech support was a different story altogether though. First off, it took me a little bit of time to explain exactly what the problem was. Then he tried to say, "Look, we don't service VCR's so I can't tell you anything." I explained to him that I don't need him to tell me how to set up my VCR. I just need to know if it is even possible to tape something on the VCR while watching a different channel on the receiver.

At this query I get a gem of a response. "Hey man. I don't even have a digital box. This is outside the area of my expertise."

To which my brain starts to scream, "WHAT THE HECK DO YOU MEAN IT'S OUTSIDE THE AREA OF YOUR EXPERTISE? I don't care if you don't have a digital box at home. You WORK doing TECH SUPPORT for a DIGITAL CABLE COMPANY! I don't take the various meds I distribute at the group home but that doesn't mean I don't know what they do! AAAAARG!!!"

Thankfully my mouth just said, "Is there anyone there who might have a clue as to how to go about doing this?" (said in a tone dripping in barely contained rage...)

The guy went away for about 30 seconds and came back to say, "One of my co-workers thinks there might be a way to do it, but he's not sure. Sorry!"

Sigh. We decided to poke around online and lo and behold, we were able to find directions ON THE COGECO WEBSITE on how to do this workaround. Man... The people in the accounts department are quite nice. The tech people scare me though. If I, someone who has been exposed to HD and digital cable technology for only a few days can brainstorm and figure out a way to do this workaround and then find it a few minutes later on their website, shouldn't someone who's being paid to actually help the less technical amongst us be able to at least offer some suggestions?

I understand that they can't really tell me, possible idiot consumer #2980, what to do with items they don't service. However, they could have at least pointed me towards the schematics on their own website. Heck, what I was asking for didn't even involve me asking them to set up my VCR... I just wanted to run cable into it and didn't know if that would be a bad thing or not.

Sigh. Bunch of morons.