Comcast Cable Card Madness

With my HD HomeRun Prime scheduled to ship next week, I decided it was a good idea to get a CableCard self install kit from Comcast so that I am ready to go when my tuner arrives. Needless to say, as is with most dealings with Comcast, it was a very maddening experience. I am posting my results since they will be helpful to others, leave a comment if you have any useful information to add or have better results than I did.

What not to do:

• Don't bother with the online chat, they would only do a "professional installation" and after wasting about an hour of my time all I had was a list of local Comcast phone numbers which can be found using Google Maps.

What to do:

• Call up your local office (find it by searching for "Comcast" on Google Maps near you).
• I spoke with the sales department.
• Self-Installs are in their system, but when he checked stock none of my local offices had any. After digging a little further he informed me that they would not be available until August 1st.
• Because we are so close to this date the sales associate offered to waive the ($16) installation fee.
• Your tuner needs to be there when the tech shows up, this leaves me out of luck as mine has not shipped yet.
• Due the the circumstances there wasn't much more I could do currently, so the sales associate left a note on my account. I am supposed to call back when I know the tuner's delivery date and schedule an install then (or self-install if it slips after the 1st).
• !!!SUPER IMPORTANT!!! write down the sale associate's ID number, date and time that you spoke with them. The next time you call back they will call you a liar and lose any track of you ever existing. Get proof now or risk ripping all your hair out later.

Edit: I've been told by a Silicon Dust employee that it should be possible to take a CableCard from one of your STBs and use that until the self install kits arrive. Since the existing card isn't paired with your tuner, it will not be able to tune copy protected content, but MythTV users cannot tune this content anyways.