The Cable Company

Yesterday was a day of errands. Those mundane things that we all have to do to live, and if we don’t do them we regret it. Some of them I put off, like lots of other people I think, because we know that by the time it’s done I know that my blood pressure will be up and I’ll be in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

That’s one reason that my driver’s license has been broken into two pieces for almost a year. I haven’t been able to mentally gird up my loins to deal with DMV to go get another one.

Yesterday, though, I had to go to the cable company. That’s usually almost as good for getting the heart rate up.

It was a semi-crisis, though, and there was no avoiding it. The clicker in the bedroom had quit working and needed replacing. If there’s anything more annoying than having to get out of your recliner to change channels or adjust the volume, it’s having to climb out of your bed to do so.

Since I had to go deal with the cell phone people anyhow (another task that’s right up there on top of the list of dreaded activities) I figured I may as well shoot the morning and deal with it all.

Getting a new remote was easy. Apparently they fail all the time and the lady at the counter didn’t ask any questions, she just took my old one and handed me a new one.

Then I asked the $64 question – “Is there anything we can do to lower the bill?”

The cable bill is appalling. It climbs a bit every year or so, and it’s easy to lose track of how much it really is. Like mid-life weight gain, the incremental increase isn’t so much but when you step back and look at the whole of it you’re shocked that you’ve allowed yourself to get in that kind of shape.

When my brain says, “You aren’t going to pay that much for cable TV!” I have to stop and realize that it’s not just the television – it’s also the computer and the telephone, and when I compare the bill from the cable provider with what the combined bills for those things used to be, it becomes a bit more acceptable, say down to the “exorbitant” range instead of up around, “shocks the conscience.”

It’s always amazing to me that customer service reps – who are simply doing their job as directed by their evil overlords – suddenly find programs for which a person qualifies when you start doing things to cut your ties with them and reduce your bill.

I was dropping tiers of channels that had crept onto the bill through earlier offers and which had fees that had stealthily crept up over time through my own neglect. Like gym memberships, we were paying for things that we don’t use. We rarely watch any of the HBO channels, being unable to stay awake during an entire movie. HBO got added onto the bill, along with Showtime and the Latino tier, a couple of years ago when we bundled it up with high speed internet and the telephone and dropped the bill $20.00 a month or so in a “limited time offer.” That’s expired, though, and all those things were on the bill at full price.

Realizing that I was intent on separation, if not divorce, the young lady pulled a trick out of her bag to light up most guys eyes and make them want to sign up for about anything.

She offered a new gadget.

In this case, they were offering to exchange the HD television receiver for a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). Of course, since she had on her computer most everything short of my blood type, she knew that we didn’t have one of these. She also figured that the xy combination of chromosomes wouldn’t let me refuse an offer of that type without a lot of internal struggle.

Mind you, we’ve had an old-style video cassette recorder plugged in for ages and haven’t touched it since the remote quit working a couple of years ago.  We don't have any blank tapes to go in it -- can you even buy those any more, or are they relegated to the back shelf of thrift stores, like 8-track tapes?

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that our lives won’t be more complete with a new DVR.

She cinched the deal by offering free installation – probably looking at me and realizing that nobody with that physique is going to be thrilled about climbing around in the dust bunnies trying to figure out how to plug the assorted wires into a television set who’s mere operation obviously exceeds his technical abilities.

When she said that a technician would come to the house and install the new DVR tomorrow – speed unheard of in cable-company terms, who usually move about as quickly as the average building contractor – I was hooked.

The question remains, though, as to why prices vary between customers. Cable companies, like utilities and some other “services” receive a franchise so that they are the ONLY one with whom you can deal if you want to buy what they offer – and sometimes, these are pretty essential. While we could get by without cable television, internet or telephone, the argument can be made that we could also get by without natural gas or electricity although I have no desire to start chopping wood for heating and cooking or reading by oil lamp. There really is no realistic alternative, and they have a government sanctioned authority to control the market.

So why don’t we all pay the same rate? If I go to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, it’s the same price for everyone who walks through the door. You don’t have to give the secret handshake and password to get a special price. Why then, do we tolerate this gamesmanship with pricing from the cable company? Who goes through their cable bill line by line every month and then goes on the internet to see if there’s a better deal available through your provider? Should a person have to do that just to be treated the same as everyone else?

As Cable Provider / Customer interactions go, this one was relatively painless, much like an addict’s trip to the Methodone clinic.

Gimme the stuff and I’m outta here.

All I had to do was promise to continue our unholy alliance for another two years. Probably the most annoying, and expected, thing happened when she read me the prepared message, made me swear fealty and then dialed the telephone where I had to listen to the exact same message on her telephone and do it all over again.

Like the video from the in-store cameras wouldn’t be sufficient witness to my willingness or something.

Now all I have to do is wait around today for the cable guy to come sometime between 1 and 3 this afternoon, so there’s still the opportunity for my blood pressure to go up again, even before I try to figure out the footlong remote that comes with the new gadget.

Maybe getting out of bad to change channels wasn’t such a bad deal after all.