The Dark Side

Okay, I maybe just made the biggest mistake since the invention of the Third Martini, but tomorrow, the Cable Guy is coming.

I haven't had cable since August of 1997. When the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster and myself moved our family to Gardner, we needed to make some adjustments. I was making the most money I'd ever made at that point, but the Frau was making no money at all because we'd just made two babies, thirteen months apart.

And you know those families who plan for the mother to stay home and be a full time Mom? They pay off debts and save like crazy and live on a budget based solely on the husband's income, banking the wife's 100% against the day when that income is gone and the furnace dies or it turns out to be twins or whatever.

We weren't one of those families. Before Em was born, we talked about how nice it would be if we were one of those families, but back then, my wife actually out-earned me, and her job was the one with the health insurance. I was still a full time typesetter and sometime writer for a libertarian/republican/right-wing-maniac opinion journal (badly hybridized with a local entertainment rag: the editor in chief envisioned the love child of the Village Voice and National Review).

The decision to do the stay-at-home-Mom thing came kind of after the fact. I still think it was the right decision, but the lack of savings was an obstacle when it came to extricating ourselves from the rather adventurous neighborhood we'd been residing in.

With no savings and little budgeting, we were trying to go from a $300 mortgage payment to an $800 one. And no, I cannot express to you how much I miss that $300 payment. I was less uncomfortable with the neighborhood than my ex, but that's not to say I was comfortable with it. What crack hadn't managed to ruin in the 1980s was being finished off by meth in the 1990s. Right after we moved in, I was on a soda run with my friend Roj and as we pulled in the QT he scanned the people hanging about and summed it up: 'They're white, but they scare me.'

So anyway, we figured that $800 was cheaper by the amount we paid the alarm company for our home security system every month, and by the gas I was buying to commute 34 miles each way, the lower utility bills of a house built in 1972 instead of 1908, etc. Still, these savings, while substantial, did not add up to $500.

So among the lifestyle luggage we jettisoned, cable went overboard. I missed it a little at first, but the house in Gardner came with a very good roof antenna, and we got the major broadcast channels of both KC and Topeka pretty well.

I used to tell myself (and everyone else) that I wouldn't get much done if I had cable to distract me, but truly, I found plenty of useless distractions without it. Not having cable does make it easy to go weeks on end without turning on the TV at all, but it's not like I'm getting a whole lot done when I make moves in 50 online chess games every day, or piddle away the hours on stuff like this blog.

Plus, I can tell Mo gets bored with the videos I check out from the library, and Em constantly recites Suite Life of Zach and Cody and Hannah Montana dialogue, and I know she'd like to catch these shows at my house.

So I get this postcard from Time Warner. Cable, Internet and Phone for $49.95 a month. If you get this card, don't call them.

Time Warner does a lot of shit right, but they systematically understaff their call centers. I can't remember ever calling and not waiting on hold so long I was pissed off. Then this.

How long to get a rep? An hour and fifteen minutes, I timed it. And then, when I get the guy on the line, I find out the $50 deal is for basic cable combined with a 93K internet connection (barely faster than dial-up even by the Time Warner guy's estimation) and local calls only on the phone.

The reason I have a Time Warner phone, I can call my friend in LA, my friend in DC (when I had friends in those places), no need to count minutes and no need to factor geography into things. Pasadena, next door, same difference.

The reason I have Time Warner internet is it's fast. And I am an internet guy if I'm not a TV guy. Proof: while I was about this dubious business, I let them charge me $5 a month more for 'turbo' that doubles my bandwidth online. For real, I'll use that.

To add basic cable to what I already buy, it turned out wasn't that much more. I almost didn't do it, I didn't want to reward the asshead VP at Time Warner who sent out an blatantly deceptive postcard, but I also already had a bunch of time in waiting. The Soviets made people wait like this for shoes that didn't fit and didn't last, and people took them anyway, just like I ended up taking cable TV.

Now I'll have to figure out those damned parental controls, figure out how to make my honyocks ask me permission to watch inappropriate things.

But yeah, I've gone over to the Dark Side, it's official.