When my dear husband and I moved into our house three years ago, we took the opportunity to get rid of Comcast cable and their lousy, lousy service.

Recently though, the dangling carrot of a $25 monthly credit and an HDTV/PVR box that we could actually lease (instead of buying for $1,000 from Direct TV or Dish Network) from Comcast was just too much for us to resist. Silly, silly, silly us. We’ve had our HDTV-ready big screen for a year and were dying to watch The Amazing Race in Amazing HDTV.

And such, the saga begins. On Sunday, July 11 we called Comcast to sign up for the promotion and they scheduled an installation appointment for the next day, Monday, July 11, between 5 and 8 p.m. At 5:30 p.m. on Monday, we got a call from the install dispatcher, who told us the installer was running a little late. I asked, “how late?” She didn’t know. Nice…why call us, then? She said she’d call the installers, then call us back. No one ever did.

At 7:30 p.m., we called the install dispatcher again and asked when they were coming out. She said he was still running late and it would be between 8:30 and 9 before we saw anyone. Okay. Fine. It’s late but as long as someone comes out, great. Finally, at around 8:45 we called…again…the dispatcher had no idea when they would get to our house, so we rescheduled our installation for four days later, Friday, July 16 between 2 and 5 p.m.

At around 2:30 on Friday the 16th, we called Comcast to check on our install. Comcast had us in the system as having an install appointment on Monday the 19th between 5 and 8 p.m. No one was coming out on Friday and gee, “we’re sorry that you were given wrong information but oh well…there’s nothing we can do about it.”

We just about came unglued. Actually, now that I think about it, in retrospect we actually DID become unglued. Me coming unglued is one thing. My husband coming unglued is another. Both of us together? Not pretty. It’s great that we have two phone lines because one of us was yelling at the install dispatcher from earlier in the week and the other was yelling at Comcast for being so inept. At 4:30 p.m., the install dispatcher told us she was very sorry and an installer would be out in half an hour.

Sure enough, our installer showed up at 5 on the dot. Unfortunately, the guy was also arrogant and a pain, at one point mentioning that his previous install customer had given him a $50 tip for being so good. He also kept pointing out that he was the Best Installer in Zee World!, both before and after he tripped our A/C up in the attic and made our house go from 72 to 90 degrees in sixty seconds. He had no manuals for our remote controls, couldn’t tell us how many hours were on our DVR and bitched and complained about “how much paperwork” he had to fill out because we were doing the Dish Buyback promotion. The ironic thing about this was I actually had to fill out the paperwork.

Anyway…we finally got the installer out of our hair and noticed that our “digital” cable looked worse than, well, analog. We unplugged the digital receiver and plugged our TV straight into the wall and had an immensely better picture. After all of the brouhaha on Friday though, we decided not to call Comcast about the service issue until Saturday.

On Saturday, we called Comcast to report our digital cable being really fuzzy. We were told that they’d send a service call through since technically it’s an “incomplete installation” and we’d hear from someone that night or early Sunday morning. We did get a call Saturday night from someone saying we’d hear from Comcast on Sunday morning. Sunday morning…nothing. Finally, we call them at 3 p.m. and are told that “someone will be there before 7 p.m.” At 5:30 p.m., the Greatest Installer in Zee World called and said that he couldn’t come out because he was too busy. What the? This was the same guy who told us two nights prior that he never missed an installation appointment because he gets dinged $$ for each missed appointment.

Ten seconds after that, we called Comcast to just cancel our service. This is BS. I’m sorry, but Comcast’s service is pitiful and their HDTV didn’t look any different than our original satellite signal. The kicker? Comcast is supposed to be by today between 8 & 11 a.m. to pick up all of the receivers. It’s 10:21 a.m. and no one has shown up yet. Want to take any bets on whether or not they show up at all? I’m skeptical since according to Comcast, we aren’t even in their system yet as being cable subscribers.

We weren’t big fans of Dish Network anyway so we’re switching to Direct TV and getting Tivo. People we know who have it love it and they’ll be out on Friday afternoon to install it…I hope.

In the meantime, since we’re working off of analog cable I won’t be able to recap Queer Eye on Wednesday or Celebrity Poker Showdown on Thursday but hope to be able to get to those shows in reruns this weekend.

Coming up this week: Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy on Fox. I’ll have to see if it’s recap-worthy!