To set the story of last night, we really need to go back a couple weeks, where our old reliable TV in the family room broke. We decided to bite the bullet and finally get on the high definition bandwagon with the purchase of a new flat panel. After reading countless reviews, looking at demos in stores, and hitting up Consumer Reports, we finally settled one. I found it on Amazon for about $100 cheaper than any store and with free shipping. One big credit card hit later, the TV was ordered.

We were all set to have the TV delivered between 3:00 and 7:00 pm two nights ago. My wife made sure she was home and we waited. At about 8:15 pm, I called the shipping company to see what was going on, as we had neither seen nor heard anything from them. After waiting on hold while they reached the driver, I was told it would be another 30 minutes before he could be there. “Is that going to be okay?” the lady asked me. “Well, no. But I want my shipment, so I guess it’s going to have to do.” I replied. After 45 minutes of additional waiting, the TV was finally delivered at 9:00 pm. Only two hours after our four hour window expired.

Well, the new TV is only so impressive if you don’t have a high definition television signal to display, so we had already called Verizon to change our FIOS service over to include the HD channels, etc. This brings us back to last night, where we had a block of time from 1:00 to 5:00 pm for a technician to come out and change out our SD DVR for an HD DVR (for some reason, they HAD to have a tech do it rather than their usual method of shipping us the new box and including a label for us to return the old). So my wife again makes sure that she’s home and available for when this guy arrives, forcing her to postpone a number of errands she needed to get done.

You can probably guess that the guy wasn’t timely, based on the first little annecdote. It gets better than just being late though, as a 4:58 pm phone call from Verizon informed my wife that the guy wouldn’t be coming at all. He was so far behind on his schedule that he just couldn’t make it to our house last night. What went unexplained was how they only figured out 2 minutes before the end of our window that he was that far behind. All for what should be a five minute service call to switch out a single set top box.

So I was disappointed right there, as I had been planning to watch game 7 of the Caps-Penguins playoff game in high def. Slightly sulky because of the lack of HD, I set the DVR to record the game so I could watch after putting the kids to bed. Now, my wife watches American Idol religiously, so that was also recording and she wanted to watch it while I caught up with the game. Not a problem, as we have the home media option from Verizon, allowing her to play back DVR recordings on any of our other TVs. When we tried to do this to allow our daughter to watch an episode of the Backyardigans before bed, we found that the multi-room DVR functionality was broken. Wouldn’t work at all… It appears to me that Verizon missed our appointment, but still made the changes to our service like they had been there, breaking our current setup.

This unexpected “feature” pushed back the time I could start watching the game by quite a bit of time, adding to my disappointment. The final straw was watching the game itself. I guess it might be a blessing that I didn’t have to watch the Caps crap the bed in high definition, but it was no less disappointing to see a highly competitive series end with a complete blowout that was never close, in score or effort on the ice. And to the Penguins, probably their biggest rival of recent memory. It’s almost as bad for me as seeing Duke get worked over by UNC for an extended series of games. Not quite that bad, but close.

Verizon gets a chance to fix our setup with another service call this morning (my wife loves that she’s trapped in the house for the third time this week). The Caps have to wait another year to see if they can make it right.