Some comments on my latest move

Just before Thanksgiving – the day before, actually – we moved to a new house.  We weren’t planning on moving quite yet, but we found a desirable property at a good price and decided to pull the trigger.  We were fortunate enough to sell out old house after just nine days on the market.  Not too shabby given the real estate market over the last few months.

Anyway, that (and Christmas) has obviously kept me quite busy lately.  And for a little over a week we’ve been without internet – I’ll get to that in a moment - which isn’t really helpful for keeping up with a blog.  As of tonight I’m back up and running and should be able to resume normal posting soon.  I thought I would take a bit of time now to discuss my interactions with various companies during the move as something of a public service.

Let’s start with the company who provided our monitored alarm system on the old house: Protection One.  They also go by a few other names regionally, although I think they have tried to unify under the Protection One moniker.  DO NOT ENTER INTO AN AGREEMENT WITH THEM.  They have an automatic renewal clause in their contract that comes with a $100 early termination fee.  I’m not talking about early termination for dropping them during the initial period of the contract.  I understand companies need to keep customers for a certain period of time to offset losses they may incur for free or reduced cost products/services.  I have no problem with that.  Protection One’s racket, which they claim is an industry standard, is that you must notify them – in writing (a fax does not count) – 30 days before the contract renews automatically to cancel your service without a penalty.  If at any time over the entire next year you have to cancel unexpectedly they hit you with a $100 fee.

We didn’t even know we were moving 30 days prior to our contract renewing.  Things happened rather quickly.  So we had to pay.  I suspect their motivation is in part to discourage people from discontinuing service and opting to get a new system through them where ever you happen to move.  I think about four states ban automatic contract renewal clauses for the reason that they are an abusive practice.

Long story short, avoid Protection One at all costs.

Huntsville Utilities was great.  No problems, very smooth transition.

I mentioned how I’ve been without internet. Well, we used to have Bellsouth (AT&T) phone and DSL and DirecTV.  We dropped the land line (which we only used to use for DSL anyway) in the move.  DirecTV – a company we absolutely adore – told us that we had to have a land line for the DVR to work.  Against our better judgement we switched to Comcast cable and internet.  The internet was fine, but the cable was TERRIBLE.  We had an HD package, but the channels would pixelate every few seconds or minutes.  It happened on the non-HD channels as well, only less frequently.  We couldn’t even watch the HD channels it became so bad.

So, after talking with a friend I called DirecTV to double check the whole land line thing.  It turns out it was just the specific receiver we had – which was to be replaced with a new HD DVR anyway – that required a land line.  So we promptly switched back to DirecTV (and the picture is awesome!), which left us without internet while we waited for Bellsouth to get our DSL service back up and running (in a stars-aligned moment Bellsouth actually offers DSL without a phone line now for an additional $5/month now).  Life is now good again.  I will say canceling the Comcast account was unbelievably painless – no hard sell or run around.

One of the best parts of the move is that I entered AL Senate District 7 just in time for the special election.  It should be fun with 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats vying for the open seat.  It does mean that I won’t be represented in the AL Senate for most or all of the session, but that probably wouldn’t be much different than if Griffith was still there.