Cut The Cord

Cut The Cord (Drop Out Of Society Without Saving A Dime)

I’ve cut the cord, joined the legions of folks who have cancelled their cable television. My ‘cut the cord’ story is probably similar to the story of many people. In my case, it was due to a long dissatisfaction with my cable company’s billing cycle and fluctuating cost. In short, I cut my cable bill. Weirdly, that is the one thing that I did not accomplish. And this is the nature of our story this evening.

There are some really neat shows on television. You can lose your life to television without thinking about it. It will suck you in, fill your mind with lowest common denominator rot, and, in the process, fill your home with semi useless products. I have no theological, sociological, psychological objection to any of this. Television is an opt-in hobby, a cheap past-time and a binding commonality for society. It’s fine.

It’s not really for me, though. It never really has been. I have stuff to do, tasks available for any waking moment. My sole television indulgence is professional football. But even then, it’s as background noise. I can get background noise from the radio, if I must.

It’s also $100.00 a month. Ok, I am cheap. I dislike ‘drag’ on my finances. This is, in the end, what inspired me to stop smoking. If television is to cost something other than lost time, lost opportunity and additional expense of electric, then it has to justify itself, at least in my frugal world. It doesn’t. That it would cost anything at all pushes it into the realm of utter waste, of money tossed to the four winds for nothing.

In my case football, CNBC, MSNBC and AMC are not worth $100.00 in drag per month. Quite frankly, very few things are. Compounding this, my cable provider was prone to pushing his bill up to $120.00 per month. And this was for the basic package or basically nothing—for the privilege of having advertising drenched and demographically imbedded content delivered at my expense. It’s like paying for junk mail. Worse, my provider could not determine what chunks of content were available at what price on a consistent basis. No matter how little I ordered, what new even lesser package I switched to, his bill needed to go up by 17% every other billing cycle. He wants $120.00 a month and he doesn’t care how little it is he has to do to charge me that much.

So I finally told him to take it and shove it.  He sent me a box to put his box in. Like the world’s worst roommate, he didn’t come back to pick up his crap. Instead he sends me a box for me to pack it up. I should have boxed his belongings and put them in the trash, but I didn’t. Worse, his box would not fit in any UPS container, so I had to drive miles out of my way to a facility to send it back to him. And I have no contract with this jackass.

In any case, it’s gone now—and with it television for the most part. In the past I have written about the revolution going on in over the air television. Thanks to a new method of broadcast, there are now more channels available over the air than ever before. In Chicagoland, where I live, there are almost 40 of these stations, all free for the plucking. All of that is a damn lie.

Your modern television doesn’t get those stations. This is because your modern television is a cable receiver. It has no external antenna. Unassisted, my modern flat-screen HD/Led Monitor Plus TV thingy gets 3 stations. That’s three out of 40 for a school marm’s grade of F. Assisted by a flat panel chepo antenna, it gets 35 channels. Enhanced by a powered antenna greatly resembling something Calder may have sculpted, it gets 38.* And that’s as good as it gets. Lost to me are the signals from CBS and local station (and former cable mainstay) WGN.

“Lost” and “Gets” are kind of odd terms here. By “Lost” I mean that even under the most ideal of circumstances, my powered and enhanced sculpture cannot detect the existence of the broadcast power of these two stations which emit from a tower that I sometimes can actually see. It isn’t as if I live in Iowa. By “Get” I mean that under the best of weather situations I actually get audio and video mostly in sync and only occasionally have a screen full of animated jigsaw bits. But now, thanks to the magic of bits of television type broadcasting, the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH has migrated from my computer experience to the Boob Tube itself.

Why exactly did we switch from analog? So that we can have television which is even less reliable, much more weather temperamental. No, no, no. It was so that we could have more stations. For instance, we need three home shopping stations and two brokered religious stations. But I shouldn’t complain. When it works, the selection is ample enough for my limited purposes.

And I shouldn’t be watching television, anyway. I think that is the final stage in my media consumption career. Given the weather (meaning that we have any variation from a windless clear day) television has become a rationed entity and somewhat easy to break away from.  Other than as a way of becoming a television isolated ogre, of weaning oneself away from the dreaded contraption and thus what little you may still have in common with your fellow earth human, I really do not suggest cable cutting. This is my path. If you in any way like television, you must pay for it. Period.

Sadly, the only internet service that I can obtain is from my previous cable vendor. Since cutting the cord, my bill has escalated from 60 dollars (already larceny) to 80 dollars and should be back to the 100-120 range within a year. So I guess cable actually was fairly worthless to begin with.

*Through trial and error, involving two generations of television aerials, it has now cost me 150.00 to receive “free” television on an optimistic 75% basis. Plus it costs me electric for the aerial, not to mention the cost of wasted space such occupies as well as the sociological harm inflicted by my having to explain WTF it is to persons visiting me.