Update on the cable caper:

After writing about it yesterday, I got my Comcast bill in the mail. Those bleeping-buggers increased our monthly bill by more than $10! Some new year's gift!

So I looked it over and tried to see where I could carve off something from it. I had something called "Digital Preferred" package for $17.95/month... I don't know what channels were in that particular package, and I was afraid to look it up... so I went online to their site and tried to find a link to click that would allow me to delete some stuff from my services. As I thought, there was none.

But there was a "contact" thing, and I could "chat" with a live person, supposedly. I actually do this a lot when I have a question and I've always had good luck with this technique, so I clicked "chat" and got "Esther" quite quickly on the screen. I'll just bet "Esther" is not her real name.

Since the bill is in Paul's name and they just hate it when I call and they guess that I'm not Paul, and they keep saying they need to talk ONLY to him, as his name is on the bill, I usually convince them that I'm the brains of this operation and Paul can't even turn the TV "on" without my help... etc. etc., they relent and talk to me. So when "Esther" addressed me as "Paul" I just went along with it, lowered my on-line voice so they wouldn't suspect anything, and pretended I was Paul. To really convince them of this, I typed everything in lower case... like maybe a computer-illiterate guy might do..

Anyway, Esther and I had a nice convo. I was very polite and didn't try to bite her head off for increasing our bill by more than $10 per month. I just asked if I could get rid of a package (Digital Preferred) as well as one of our "additional outlets" - of which we have 3 and which cost us $3.99 per month per outlet each month!!! She said we'd have to disconnect the said outlet and take it, physically, up to our local Comcast place and show them our paperwork and they would take it off our account.

I tried getting out of that by saying I wasn't able to get out much - couldn't they send someone here to pick it up? But she said there would be a fee charged for that, so I said "oh OK... I'll TRY to get out and up there some time this week." (Paul has been there before and knows basically where it is.) So I agreed to do it so no fee would be charged.

He's going to go up there this morning.

It's the box that is plugged into his TV in the bedroom that we are giving up. We have 3 of these additional outlets, one in the basement where Paul has a 12 inch really old fashioned TV but he works down there and he does watch it during the winter months when he spends his whole day there working on gear. And then we have one in the "eating room" off the kitchen where we watch tv every night while having supper, and there's the one upstairs in his bedroom which he NEVER watches at all anymore. So that's the one that is going.

It won't be a big deduction in our bill but it will cover the $10 they just increased it and also an additional $12 more.

I am still interested in finding an alternative to all this high cost stuff. I am interested in hearing how my sister-in-law and brother make out this week when they speak with a rep from Direct TV who is coming to their house to smooth-talk them into signing their lives away for Direct TV. I've warned her about the pitfalls of that after researching it online. After the first year apparently the cost goes WAY up and it's almost no better than Comcast! So I told her to beware...



Above: Bex, Toni, Sarah, and Chuck many moons ago!

So that's the poop on the cable caper.

It's cold here now. We had about 17 snowflakes fall down from the sky yesterday, right while Paul took the dogs out for a short walk! But that was it. Only 17. They didn't really amount to anything! No drifts... and certainly no snowmen could be constructed.

Cheers,

Bex

I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals...
They are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied... not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

~ [Walt Whitman, from "Leaves of Grass, No. 32"] ~

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