Geek Squad / incompitence

I can beat all of that. Comcast decided to contract them out when we got the cable/internet/phone deal. I work nights, so I needed an afternoon appointment or later. He started calling us at 8 AM, trying to get us to agree. Finally, he just showed up at 10:30 unannounced. He didn't want to use our crawl space, which was fine with us. We hate to use it, so we aren't going to force anyone else to. However, he decided to put the cable on the wrong side of the house.

The side he put it on is between our house and a BAD neighbor. We just have a narrow space between houses, and their kids are always pulling stuff, like drain pipes, off of our house. A month later, we're still surprised they haven't managed to remove the cable. Of course, the job he did was pathetic. Comcast has had to come out THREE times to redo various connections, including what ever he did up on the pole.

One of the problems was with the phone. I have my 90 year old grandmother here. We need to have a valid phone at all times, just in case we need 911. Thankfully, there are two cell phones in the house, since we were without our Comcast number for awhile. We still have problems with one of the phones.

And then we come to the best of all. The computers. He was refusing to set up my desktop at all. He even claimed that a) no one told him we had a desktop; b) Geek Squad (the company) doesn't work on desktops. When I told him I wouldn't sign off on his paperwork without the desktop, he did something with the LAN card set up, said it didn't work, and told me that he would have to charge me $100 an hour (he would charge, not Geek Squad) to work on it.

So I told him I'd just try to run Linux and see if that would help. He gave me a dirty look, then stopped working. He said the laptop was set up, and that's all we needed. He also left our second TV unconnected. He told me that I could do that however I wanted. I still wouldn't sign off, so he said he needed something from the truck. He left me upstairs to hook up the TV, and got someone else in the family to sign off before he snuck off.

Still not convinced that the computer was the best part? Well, there's more. He didn't actually set up the laptop to use our connection. That would have taken effort. Instead, a neighbor had an unsecured account in broadcast range, so he just tapped us into that. Technically, that's illegal. But then, so is trying to bully a customer of $100 in cash for what Comcast / Geek Squad paid him for.

So, to sum up - The idiot wired the wrong side of the house, because it saved him five minutes of work, did a half-@ssed job with the cable, resulting in it being redone by Comcast at their expense, messed up the downstairs TV (took the DVD & VHS off line to save time), gave us what was obviously a used cable box for On Demand (it had to be replaced the next day), a used router that had to be replaced, messed up a desktop (for the record, the LAN worked with Ubuntu Linux), and set up an illegal connection for our laptop. Then after all of that, he expected us to be stupid enough to give him a $100 tip to finish his job.

Yes, I would recommend Geek Squad. To everyone I don't like.