Er, not really.
I finally got cable installed this morning. I've done quite nicely without cable since setting up shop here, but now that it's (a) baseball season and (b) BSG season, cable must be had. So the Obama-pin-wearing-middle-aged cable technician came this morning and voila! A zillion channels magically appeared in my idiot box. I even got a spiffy new remote just for the cable.
But.
Everything associated with the remote appeared to work fine: menus, On Demand, volume, etc. Except that when I tried pressing actual numbers (e.g. '5' and '9' for channel '59'), nothing happened. I made a weak stab at troubleshooting before deciding that I must be doing something wrong and calling Comcast. The cure? The remote's default setting for "Channel Entry Behavior" was on "No Auto Tune," and I had to change it to "Auto Tune." I'm sure that when they sat down to determine what language to use on their menus, someone must have raised some objection to such phrasing. What I would like to know what arguments the pro-'Channel Entry Behavior' and pro-'Auto Tune' marshaled in order to win. I suppose that 'Channel Entry Behavior" could have been worse, but who on earth is going to look at 'Auto Tune' and think, "Oh yes, my sweet, sweet 'Auto Tune,' now I shall finally be able to go directly to FOX News. Bliss!"
Folks, unless this was an anomaly and most technicians change this for their clients and mine just forgot (understandable, it being early Sunday morning), this is ridiculous. Has Comcast ever heard of usability, user friendliness, or the basic fact that what any red-blooded American is going to do when faced with a new remote is start punching in numbers? I know that lots of remote control behavior consists of browsing, but there are also many, many times when you have a known and desired channel that you want to go to directly. To disable that functionality from the start is just about one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.
I don't normally think about library-related usability issues on Sunday mornings -- in fact, I am usually asleep at this time -- but clearly this one just landed in my lap with a thunk. It's actually a nice little vignette: reasonably bright user unable to perform basic task due to (a) ignorance of where to look and (b) incomprehensible jargon. If the lesson were any more obvious, I might cry.
P.S. If it had occurred to me to look in the setup menu, I might have had a shot at solving it myself. The thing is, who will look under "set up" in order to change channels by pressing numbers? It is so basic that I skipped setup entirely. Hmm, now I'm wondering how much sense that makes.