Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The gadget works fine -- the real challenge is finding a matching CableCard. Comcast declined to ship CableCards to me by mail or bring them to my home on a service visit. (At least in my area; yours may be different.) Instead Comcast invited me on an expedition to its local office. If your Comcast local office is anything like mine, the customer service counter is staffed by older ladies who are mostly clueless about technology, electronics, and computers. Their perch is patronized by grumpy customers who resent paying the high prices Comcast imposes. The goal of the counter-ladies is to dispense with the grumpy customers swiftly and reach their lunch on time. Behind the counter they keep stacks of set-top boxes, modems, remote controls, cables, etc., and they award these jewels to customers as merited. Over in some forgotten drawer of a dust-covered desk there's a pile of CableCards too. The CableCards in the pile all look alike: aluminum case (shiny!), credit-card-sized but thicker, same weight as a pack of gum, indecipherable gibberish written on the back. The CableCards arrived at the pile mainly because nobody wanted them. Maybe a grumpy customer brought them in. Maybe they were found skating around the back of a service van. Maybe they were inherited from that office the next town over when it closed. The ladies learned in training that CableCards could plug-into Comcast’s fancier set-top boxes to tune extra channels. They also heard rumors that CableCards were needed for the newest TiVo appliances. They remembered reading a nasty memo explaining how Comcast was legally mandated to hand over CableCards to paying customers without further charge. Yet requests for CableCards were few and far-between; for the most part the CableCards simply sit neglected in their drawer. Enter our Hero: a man who just purchased an HdHomeRun and is motivated to make it work before his wife discovers its cost. He asks the counter-lady for "an M-card," quite properly. She knows an M-card is one sort of CableCard, and she knows the CableCards are kept in that drawer in that desk over there in the corner, so she smiles politely and steps away. She pulls open the drawer, leafs through the pile, and notices how much alike all the CableCards appear. They’re all so shiny (!) and that gibberish printed on the back of each is too small to read anyway. She silently sings a verse of "eenie-meenie-miney-moe," selects a fine specimen, and delivers it to the hapless customer at the counter. What could go wrong? If our Hero is to succeed in his noble quest, it is here and now he must assert himself. Let’s review the key obstacles. 1. Many of the CableCards in the pile are programmed for use in Comcast set-top boxes. Those same cards will not work in HdHomeRuns or other third-party appliances. It’s one or the other. 2. The counter-lady has never heard of an HdHomeRun (and doesn’t care to learn). 3. The counter-lady cannot distinguish an M-card from other sorts of CableCards that are not M-cards. In fact, the distinction never occurred to her. She’s bewildered by its significance to our Hero. 4. The counter-lady cannot differentiate a functional CableCard from a faulty CableCard. 5. A substantial fraction of CableCards in the pile are broken/fried/defective. (Recall the pile constitutes an accumulation of CableCards nobody wanted.) 6. Lunch time draws near. Before he retires to his castle, our Hero must examine the CableCard for himself. He is honor-bound to reject any CableCard which… 1. Bears a "Motorola" logo (on the front) and a serial number (on the back) which begins with any letter other than "M". 2. Bears a "Cisco" logo (on the front) and a serial number (on the back) which begins with any letter other than "P". 3. Seems to have endured a game of badminton. 4. Seems to have been rode hard and put away wet. 5. Smells like dog poop. So endeth the lesson.