So MomWonder, KidWonder and I packed up and moved out of NYC and into beautiful Westchester County this past week. The move went reasonably well (I would recommend Moishe’s moving company in the NYC area), and we had Con Ed turning the lights on btw 8am and 12pm and Cablevision btw 11am and 2pm. Con Ed came late, which is not a good thing when you have a 4 month old and its nearly November in the Northeast. When MomWonder reminded them of KidWonder, they hurried up.

So this post is not about Con Ed… no, its not. Its about Cablevision. I thought I’d be let down transitioning from Time Warner Cable to Cablevision, but I wanted to be optimistic. MomWonder and I had grand plans for the install, one digital phone line downstairs, and one upstairs, one cable box downstairs, and one upstairs. Everything was great, until the serviceman got there - and flatly refused to do *any* in-house wiring. Now, I’ve lived in apartments in NYC for 14 years before this, and have NEVER had a serviceman refuse to wire. So with the chaos of the move going on, and the serviceman staring at us, wanting so desperately to leave, we relented. Now I’m typing on my computer which we had to put in the master bedroom, instead of in the small bedroom we had envisioned being an office, and both phone lines are plugged into the cable box, also in the master bedroom.

And that’s not all. A few days into having service, people started complaining that they couldn’t reach my blog or e-mail me anything on the vanity domain I have running off my home computer. After some digging, it turns out that Optimum Online customers cannot run a web server on port 80 out of the box. They have to buy a package called Optimum Online Boost in order to have port 80 (and SMTP/25) unblocked, which costs $10 a month more. It would cost even more if I didn’t already have a subscription to both cable and digital phone. Turning the Optimum Online Boost on was no picnic either, we signed up via web form, then nothing happened, then I called customer service, then a supervisor was involved, then I got a callback, then a transfer, then I had to log into a web console to unblock the ports, and then, only then, did I have port 80 unblocked. And good thing too, as this blog was not available until I had worked all of this out.

So, bottom line: Bad service by the installer; Bad policy of forcing people to buy into what is essentially a business level account just to allow port 80 traffic (Roadrunner does no such thing), good customer service trying to solve my problems in using Boost.

Final tally: Cablevision… Boo.