illustration courtesy of naturesgraffiti.com
TV does not really capture my attention, with one or two exceptions. Mostly I find it inconvenient. Even though I am not paying attention to it, it is on most the day. Since we stopped taking the print version of the paper, Husband turns it on in the morning while I am blogging and it never seems to get turned off. He is partial to the news shows which he watches in the afternoon as well. Me, I’d rather not know most the crap that is fed us as news and I’m usually in a different room. We have resisted cable all these years having tried it once and found it to be just more crap that you have to pay for. Finally though, they got a hook in Husband.
“Special offer,” he says to me, “basic cable for 99¢ a month for a year, after that we’ll cancel.”
“Basic cable is crap.” I remind him.
“Special offer.” he says again.
“Foot in the door.” I tell him.
“99¢ a month.” he repeats.
“Camel’s nose in the tent.” I reply.
His eyes have glazed over, rolling up. “Cancel” he mutters.
“OK. Whatever.” I sigh, “but every time they call trying to sell more service, I’m giving the phone to you and when they start charging full price, you have to call them.”
The sales calls started right away and they started charging us full price 3 months later. Husband calls and reminds them of the deal. Three months later, they charge full price again. Husband calls and reminds them of the deal. This went on all year. When Husband called to cancel, they gave us a date that the technician would come and terminate the service and charged us a fee for it. The day came and went. Our basic cable continued.
The phone rang a few days later. It was the cable company doing a customer satisfaction call. Their records indicated that a technician had been out to our place to terminate the service and were we satisfied. I told them, sure, thinking that they would flip whatever switch and the cable would stop. It never did. We’re still getting the basic cable service. It’s still crap but at least they have stopped billing us for it.
Basic cable only has one redeeming feature and that’s the food channel. For someone who no longer does the cooking around here you’d think that would be the least interesting thing on to me but I find it to be very entertaining...the searches for the perfect (food of choice), the competitions, the throw downs. Lately I’ve seen a couple of shows showing how products are made and mass produced and the thing that astounds me the most is the tonnage of raw materials that go into the product that only one plant will make in a year. Like mustard. Tons of mustard seed, which are tiny, by the way. That blows my mind. Where do you get tons of mustard seed? It was all about bar-b-cue sauce tonight. Tons of tomato paste. That’s a lot of resources devoted to tomato paste.
Last night it was all about hotdogs. We probably don’t want to go there.
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