WARNING: This product contains rants

On Sunday night, my DirecTV service went out. It was snowing. This didn't surprise me. When I had Dish Network, and it snowed heavily, as the weather is wont to do in Denver, sometimes there'd be so much snow either on the satellite dish, or just plain in the air, that TV reception would fail.

The snow stopped after an hour or two. The TV service didn't return however.

I scheduled a service call for, this morning, between 8am and 12pm.

Fluffy bunny optimist that I am, I phoned them this morning, at 8am, to see if they were able to give me a rough idea of which end of 8-12 I could expect their repair guy to show up. They couldn't.

No, apparently, in this day of high-speed communications, DirecTV - a company that makes its living, selling broadband services - can't contact its service personnel, once they're out of yelling distance. Nor, apparently do they keep any kind of list, showing the order of the repairman's calls that day.

To make matters worse, the bastards didn't show up between 8 and 12. They also didn't call to say they weren't going to make it. That, is just plain rude.

Eventually I called them. Apparently it takes four members of staff find out the phone number for the local service office, who are the people who are able to tell actual concrete lies about when the repair guy is going to show up.

They assured me, he'd be there in, "about half an hour, to an hour".

Two hours later, he arrived at my door. Funnily enough, he had a mobile phone on him, as well as a walkie-talkie. It was almost as if he could have been contacted, and let the office know when he was actually going to show up.

Did I mention my espresso maker isn't working, and I have no filter coffee?

As I write, I'm sat in the WPCC, guzzling a bucket of espresso, and in a cruel twist of humour, the radio is playing Cypress Hill's "Jump Around".