Surprise subject line, huh? Seriously, I can't seem to win an ongoing battle with Comcast but I can't place the blame entirely upon them. Here's the problem I'm having with my cable TV service:

In the warm months, my signal is too strong coming into the house to the extent that my distribution amp overdrives the signal for the digital receivers. This results in "freeze frames", etc. Comcast's solution was to remove the distribution amp and replace it with an 8-way splitter.

This fixes the problem with the digital receiver, but the remaining TVs with basic cable have a crappy picture. I've just learned to live with that part.

Now that it has gotten cold, Comcast has gone around padding the line extenders in the area to compensate for the temperature change. This means that my signal is too low now and I have to put the distribution amp back in.

They claim that until the budget allows for auto-compensating LEs to be installed, I'm just going to have to live with this. Truth be known, it really isn't a big deal for me to move eight cables from a splitter to an amp, but that's because I know what I'm doing. I can't imagine a typical customer being capable (or willing) to do this.

I do know that Es Comcastico has a truck in my tiny neighborhood once a week at different neighbors' houses. I don't even waste my time calling them anymore because I'm tired of the double talk, plus I'm not very good at speaking Spanish. That is assuming of course that I'm able to get them to actually send someone. Most calls usually result in "unplug all of jour TB sets and count to tirty......"

I usually hang up before my head explodes. Does anyone know of any buzz words I can use with them to make them come up with a real solution?

Ed Vaughn, MBSWWYPBX