Block Copy Coders

Sorry for the rather course way of starting this blog but to be honest it’s completely warranted.

Last week saw my Sky HD box go pop, it just wouldn’t turn on and refused to respond to the many different of resetting it a quick googling threw up. All of the sky boxes I’ve had have been a bit flakey but things do break so I called Sky and booked in an engineer to come and sort things out. I was told he’d be there between 8am and 11am on Friday, Nice!

Now I have a fairly old plasma panel, it’s a pretty nice bit of kit but because of its age doesn’t have a HDMI connector but does have component ports for HD. The Sky HD box I had has component outputs but I know that the latest versions don’t. I explained this when booking the call and made it clear I’d need an older style box with component outputs to see HD. “That’s fine” they said.

What could possibly go wrong?

First of all the engineer hadn’t turned up by 11. I called Sky and was told he’d be there by 1pm. He wasn’t. So I called again and was told he’d be there by 2pm. I was a bit annoyed by this point even saying “I really hope when he eventually turns up he’ll have the right type of box because if he doesn’t that would the absolute worst thing that could happen”

He arrives at 2:30pm, new box in hand but completely bereft of any apology and the first thing he does is kick over a cup of coffee onto the carpet. Not a great start. “Does that have component outputs?” I ask as he brings in the replacement box. “What’s component? I dinnae nae what that is?”. We look at the box. It doesn’t. He asks me again what component outputs are. We phone Sky.

Now they tell me this (paraphrased) “We don’t make Sky HD boxes with component outputs any more. We do have many of the old boxes that have been refurbished. We do not know where any of these boxes are. If the engineer has an old style box on his van when he turns up then you can have that. We can not guarantee that he will. We are fucking idiots so we didn’t tell you this when you booked the service call. Do you want to book another service call? The engineer might have the sort of box you want?”

Fuck Sky!

I cancelled my account and went and bought a Freesat box. You can read all about Freesat here. The box I wanted didn’t have component outputs either so in a fit of anger I bought another telly too. GNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGHGGGGGGGGGGG

Freesat seems pretty good, it gives us some HD channels and most of the channels we watch and the HUMAX receiver is an alright dual tuner PVR. The software is a little clunky but it works okay and doesn’t cost £40 a month or shorten my life expectancy through the raging fury induced by Sky customer service. The only loss is (chortle) Lost on Sky. I don’t like it much but Suzey does so we’ll be either buying that from iTunes or downloading it like a filthy pirate terrorist.

Again.

Fuck Sky!