I sat down last night to do something I really didn\u2019t want to do, but felt I had to: order the pay-per-view broadcast of the U.S. soccer team\u2019s World Cup qualifier in Guatemala.<\/p>\n
The game was only available that way because of the rules which give the home team all television rights. The Guatemalan federation sold the rights to Traffic, a Brazilian company with an American office. They specialize in being player agents and managing television rights. They are also the most evil, disgusting people in the world when it comes to American soccer, but that\u2019s another screed for another day.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t want to fork out the dough, but just have a compulsion to watch these qualifying games. So I found the pay-per-view listing on my Comcast system and settled in. The screen had a button which said \u201cBuy,\u201d so I clicked it. That led to another screen with a button which said \u201cBuy.\u201d I clicked that one also and found myself staring at a third screen. I needed to call in to order the program.<\/p>\n
Why the hell do they have Buy buttons if you can\u2019t use them to buy something? I had to translate the 1-800-XFINITY number to digits (not a big deal, but still annoying), find an old bill to log in to my account via the phone system, then had to find my wife\u2019s Social Security number since the account is in her name (and she was asleep) and they won\u2019t let you do anything without that.<\/p>\n
And they still almost couldn\u2019t hook me up. Apparently, our account was not authorized to buy pay-per-view events. I don\u2019t know why. I don\u2019t remember setting that up. Even if I did, there should be some notification of that or it should disable the multiple buttons that say \u201cBuy\u201d or it should give me the opportunity to authorize the box using the account number or something. If Comcast can send me a message on all three of our boxes every time there is a boxing or MMA match for sale, they can figure out how to get me to call without stringing me along until the end.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, Carmen, my new favorite customer service rep, came through for me, authorized my account and got me the game before kickoff. She even sympathized with me about the illogical nature of having a Buy button for something I needed to call in to buy. Why does the logic always exist with the CSRs and not elsewhere in situations like this?<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sat down last night to do something I really didn\u2019t want to do, but felt I had to: order the pay-per-view broadcast of the U.S. soccer team\u2019s World Cup qualifier in Guatemala. The game was only available that way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cable","category-soccer","wpcat-51-id","wpcat-19-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1854,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1853\/revisions\/1854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}