Friday, October 4, 2013

The Sideshow that Never Ends

Although my still-aboveground "temporary" line remains in place and uncut, meaning I have television and internet service, I can no longer watch Turner Classic Movies or baseball playoffs on the Turner Broadcasting System channel. I also can't watch CNN, Headline News, Boomerang and the Cartoon Network, but I usually didn't.

As my Cable One communications rep whined to me in an e-mail the other day and the Cable One CEO has been whining on commercials while wearing a stylish regular-guy denim shirt, darned old Turner wanted a tremendous price increase to carry channels with declining ratings. I now probably owe all of you a new keyboard, since charging lots of money for channels nobody watches in order for them to watch the half dozen or so they want is in fact Cable One's business model.

I don't want to watch Headline News; I can get anything they have either from CNN, MSNBC, Fox or online. I've never watched it when I've been outside of an airport, and I am pretty sure whoever the airport's cable company bills for its service, it isn't me. But I have to pay to get Headline News delivered to me in order to be able to watch a channel I do like, such as the aforementioned Turner Classic Movies. Or ESPN. Or the Major League Baseball network.

In other words, Turner is doing to the whiners at Cable One exactly what the whiners at Cable One do to every stinking subscriber they have. So I think the whiners at Cable One should shut up and pay, because that is exactly what they think I should do.

A second whining e-mail came the other day, saying that even though Cable One still had an agreement in place for a few of the Turner channels, once they stopped carrying the others, Turner pulled the plug on the remainder. Again, this is exactly the way Cable One behaves towards its subscribers. I have a bundled service, and if I only paid the internet portion of my bill, they would not only yank the TV portion I didn't pay for, they would also yank the internet portion I did pay for, because I had not paid all of my bill. So my response is the same -- Cable One should shut up and pay, because that's what they would tell me to do if I tried the same trick.

And once again, I will be curious to see if my bill is any less for the month of October, since I am not receiving all of the channels I signed up for. I doubt it. I think I shall soon spend a diverting afternoon considering other possible internet and television service providers. Not because I think they won't overcharge me or require me to pay for stuff I don't want in order to get stuff I do want: Of course they will.

But at least they haven't asked me to feel sorry for them when someone else does to them what they do to me every month.

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