I have had Tivo for a couple of years now.  I love it.  The ability to pause and rewind “live” TV and to record my favorite shows (ahem a lot of shows) and watch them at my convenience (again with the ability to fast forward through those horrid commercials, was a dream come true.  Yes I dream small right now in my life.

Kathy also had Tivo,but our accounts were separate.  She could record up to however many hours on hers and I on mine.  We were completely content.  Or so I thought.

Seems Kathy dreams bigger than I.  She mentioned to me the idea of switching out of our Charter Cable (Hi Richard and all you awesome Charter guys on Twitter!) to ATT Uverse.  Gretchen has Uverse and has been happy with it (to the best of my knowledge).  I called both ATT and Tivo and asked since I had until the end of November in my NON REFUNDABLE Tivo contract, would I be able to use both together.  The answer from both was yes. So the switch was made.

Liars, all of them.

To Tivo’s credit, when I called them to help me set up their box (because the ATT installer guy REFUSED! {which I have already discussed with the fabulous Mr. Coppers [more on him later]}), they tried their hardest and were flummoxed when it didn’t work.  It seems ATT is new to our area and no one has requested before me to hook up Tivo.  Cue my frustration.

I, in my infinite wisdom of social media, cry and yell and scream my frustration to Twitter.  Within an hour I have a response from @ATTCarolyn asking me to follow her so we can DM and offering her assistance.  Within 24 hours I have received a personal phone cal from the aforementioned Mr. Gary Coppers, an Executive with ATT asking how he can help.  Unfortunately this all happened just as I was going through my own personal hell with my Sprint phone (don’t even get me started on that one!) so we played phone tag for a few days and then I was incommunicado for at least a week or two.

But Mr. Coppers persisted, he knew he had an unhappy customer out there and I can only assume that that fact niggled at the back of his mind and he was not going to sleep well at night until that customer was made happy.  We finally reconnected this morning and conference called with his Tier 2 specialist Brian N.  I liked Brian immediately, when I asked a stupid question, he came right back with a polite and concise answer, but I could tell from the inflection of his voice that he was thinking something different.

When I questioned him regarding the confusion over primary and secondary emails and the thought that I may lose my email if there were changes made (GASP!), he politely said that yes, that is an issue and yes that could happen.  But in his mind and in his tone he said “tough”.  And I respect that.

I inundated Brian and Mr. Coppers with numerous questions and concerns, some where fixed and some were not.  But more importantly ALL were answered and answered well.  I continuously asked for clarification, but I think the clarification was more because I wasn’t the one being clear in my question or concern.

Even though they were unable to fix my main concern regarding Tivo, I am very happy with the service I have received.  My latest Tweet was “Dear Att Uvers, although your product is inferior, your customer service is outstanding.”

Sleep well Mr. Coppers.

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