You know what I hate?

Bad customer service. This whole Tivo thing has exposed me to some very very good and some very very bad customer service the last few days.

First: Directv. They have been fabulous. They, allegedly, no longer support tivo units, but they were incredibly informed and helpful when I called to set up my tivo, and then when I was having trouble getting local channels. Even though I called at 11:30 at night, I was able to talk to someone quickly and they were extremely helpful. This issue eventually resolved itself.

Vonage, on the other hand, is a different story.

Since I did a factory reset on the Tivo unit, it has to dial the tivo service for it's initial set up before we can use the DVR feature. We use VoIP (vonage) which doesn't handle data calls very well (signal gets converted from digital, to analog, then back to digital before it even leaves my house, too much room for error, I guess.) I tried to solve it myself using Google, and then I tried to call Vonage.

Their call center is CLEARLY overseas somewhere, both of the people I talked to (I had to call back) had thick accents and the call center was VERY loud. It was hard for me to hear them because of all the back ground noise, and then the accents made it worse. Not to mention, they had never even HEARD of Tivo! Finally, the first person transferred me to someone who spoke english and knew what they were talking about. When I had to call back later, I tried to get the second non-english guy to just transfer me right away. They kept asking for my cellphone number in case they "had to call me back" Bah.

Long story short, I'm taking the Tivo to a friend's house this afternoon to try to get it to dial in, wish me luck.