Reason 6,572 Why We Dislike Comcast

All of New England prepared to stop this morning to enjoy the pre-dawn opening of the 2008 baseball season. The electric grid was doubtlessly strained as coffee pots around the region flicked on at 6 a.m.

But it was the most important utility of the day that struck out swinging. Bloggers around Boston report that their cable or satellite TV went down.

If anything could top the animosity generated by stuffing a meeting on net neutrality with your employees, a massive bed-crapping on Opening Day will do it.

Red at Surviving Grady led the expletive-laden charge.

Dale Arnold tells me Ellsbury just made a spectacular catch, but as my Comcast has whisky d*ck, I just wouldn’t know.

The problems weren’t limited to our favorite cable whipping boy. DirecTV customers flooded Boston.com’s Extra Bases blog with complaints. Users from around the country reported not being able to get the game at all, or only being able to see it in HD.

It doesn’t seem that the satellite company’s customer service is much better than Comcast’s, according to a commenter on Boston.com.

Buster Olney on ESPN was just complaining about the same problem. I told the DirecTV rep that DirecTV was taking a beating online and on TV, but she didn’t seem to care. When I asked about compensation for the outage, she said, “I’m certain that once this is corrected, we will issue compensation.” When I repeated what she said, she totally backtracked.

Eric Wilbur didn’t have much luck getting a straight answer either. Comcast told him a transponder went down in North Attleborogh, and that DirecTV told a customer that they were having a software problem. In any case, Wilbur’s still peeved.

Here at the Globe, where I’m sure you envision an ESPN Zone atmosphere in the sports department, complete with cheerleaders, pretzel vendors, and HD flat screens as far as the eye can see, it was the same thing. Blank TVs sat at our work stations, the bouncing DirecTV icon a taunting reminder of what was unavailable.

There is good news in all this. The kids who whined to the Herald about having to take the MCAS tests instead of watching the game live didn’t miss anything. Also, terrestrial radio won’t be going anywhere as long as television is still so unreliable.