Archive for June 12th, 2012

Last Fall when we moved into our new house, our cable provider offered us a free upgrade for four months. The free upgrade gave us essentially every channel package except for some of the movie channels — hardly an issue, as between Netflix, Redbox and other sources, I have more than a lifetime’s worth of movies at my disposal.

The catch to this free gift is that the packages aren’t automatically cancelled at the end of the trial period. And for four months we watched them all, or as many of them as we could. We watched the Game Show Network, the NBA channel, the BBC channel, and so many more.

Then the trial period ended and our cable bill jumped to $180. That doesn’t included Internet, either — $180 a month for cable television. Just as cancelling channels is the opposite of adding channels, the process of cancelling channels was the opposite of adding them as well. Gone were the friendly voices that were there to add the channels; in fact, after 5pm, you can’t cancel anything at all. And before 5pm, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be on hold until after 5pm.

After much persistence (and some begging on their part) the packages were removed. Bye bye, Game Show Network! Bye bye, MTV South America! Bye bye, Telemundo in HD!

So sad; now we are down to 400 channels, and somehow our Caller ID channel (yes, we had a Caller ID channel) got lost in the process as well.

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