Crazy But Able

Peggy and I don’t have cable, not even extra-basic cable light that they try to pressure you into buying if you get a cable modem. Peggy’s opinion is, “I need the internet for work and school, why should we pay extra for TV stations we’re not going to watch? If they give it to us for free, then okay, but otherwise, no.” (Peggy makes the financial decisions in the marriage, which is good: if I was in charge we’d be homeless but up to our ears in iPods.)

The cable company was not very happy with our decision to shut them out of our lives; for a month and a half there was a barrage of phone calls, followed by a tragically comic parade of door to door Comcast salesmen. Sales guy 1 would come knocking. No, we don’t want basic cable. The next day (literally), sales guy 2 showed up, with sales guy 1 in tow. Sales guy 2 had some incredible deals, one of which was entirely free basic cable, but he couldn’t give it to us because Peggy is already getting a UMinn discount. A week later, sales guy 3 showed up, with sales guy 1 AND sales guy 2 in tow. He had even greater deals, but by now I was getting sick of the Travelling Comcast Roadshow, so I told him that our only TV just broke and we weren’t planning on getting a new one. (Our TV did just break, but we were able to fix it[*], so we didn’t really need a new one after all. So it wasn’t quite a lie, I just omitted the “we were able to fix it” part.)

I almost wish I hadn’t blown them off; if the then-present trends would have continued, we’d be up to a couple dozen sales guys, offering to pay us 20 bucks a month to watch MASH re-runs. The funniest part about all of this is we don’t even pay for our cable modem, Peggy’s company does! We’d have to pay for any extra cable we got, however, hence, no cable.

[*] Before anyone gets any fancy ideas about my TV repair skills, I should point out that “we were able to fix it” really means “we found out that, when the picture goes out, it comes back on if you slap the side of the TV really hard”. In the world of computer programming, this would be called a “workaround”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2005 at 6:34 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.