Apparently, it doesn't matter which television provider you use!

From about three months before we moved out of the condo and right up until the week before Christmas, our television set up was a beautiful, new, wall-mounted 42" LCD screen with a safety pin poked into the cable input so I could watch Here & Now and Land & Sea, and my 'stories' (not that I watch them every day - it's just an occasional guilty pleasure, like my grandma used to say of her once-weekly Another World fix, "just watch long enough to see what Rachel is up to").

Anyway, the point is that we now have Bell ExpressVu satellite and I couldn't care less. I'm a fairly passive TV user and I manage to acquire everything I really want to see from the internet, so having a million channels to choose from is not that important to me. However, since I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it, no exceptions. Dawn, a reader who had some difficulty with getting that service from Aliant TV, seems to feel the same way. Here's her story:

"I came home from work on a Friday only to find out I had no TV service. I tried rebooting my system a few times and still had no luck so I called the support line. They again ran through the reboot system with me and still no luck. I was advised they could only have someone come to my house on Monday morning. I said it was not acceptable as I had to go to work, and asked if something else could be arranged. The agent advised that he could get someone there on Saturday, and asked what time I would like them to be there. I said before 12 would be great.

Saturday morning I stayed home (I only get two days off as I work all week), but by 11:30 no one had showed, so I decided to call in and verify the appointment. I got another
agent who advised me that I was booked for Monday morning and nowhere on the ticket report was Saturday morning showing. I was dumbfounded and went through
the whole conversation that I had the night before. I advised I would be working Monday morning, but my husband would be home in the afternoon, so they could send someone by then.

I made it through the weekend without TV which is very hard for me as I am a TV junky!

On Monday, I picked my husband up at the airport - he had just gotten off a flight after working a nightshift. I advised him he would have to stay up as the repair
guy from Aliant would be coming to fix the cable that afternoon. I called home about 3:30 pm and I was advised that no one had shown up yet. I called
in to Aliant again, only to be told that my appointment had been cancelled, as the problem is fixed. I told them my TV still did not work and wondered why, if my problem had been
fixed, someone hadn’t contacted me to see if I had service. The agent was silent and then told me that the next appointment available was Tuesday afternoon. Guess what? No one showed on Tuesday, either. By this time, I was getting to the point where it was just too funny to talk about it. Each time I talked to someone different. Each time I was told this
was not their normal service and each time a different agent screwed up.

It got to the point where my husband called, got really angry with them and something finally got done on Wednesday. This really pissed me off even more as I was being nice
and got nothing done. He called and got nasty and got something done. What is wrong with the world?

I have to say it was a little too late; at that point I had already called Rogers and made an appointment for them to come and hook us up.

Thanks to the poor service of Aliant TV, they also lost the phone and internet service I had with them.

Oh, and a month later I received a bill saying I owe them $400 as I did not return my receiver boxes for the TV. They had been dropped to the Aliant store on Stavanger Dr about three weeks before. I had kept the receipt copy so I called in once again to clear things up.

I am now a happy Rogers' customer !!!!!"

How's that for balancing the heat we put on Rogers last week?