rumiNATION

Oh yeah, hello blog. I've forgotten all about you for the past month, it would seem.

The news of the day is that after months of threatening to do so, I finally pulled the trigger on cancelling our cable television today. This was due to several factors, not the least of which was the diminishing level of options accompanied by a rising cost on a nearly yearly basis.

So now we've got a good old fashioned antenna on the roof, Netflix streaming through the BluRay player for those times when network television doesn't have anything to offer and I'm currently working on hooking Melissa's old Mac Mini up to the TV downstairs so we can perhaps stream some of our favorite television programs from MTV & Bravo.

The best news about today's trigger pulling was that it wasn't nearly as messy as I'd anticipated. In the past, calls to RCN usually followed the same pattern:

1) Have my call answered by an outsourced calltaker somewhere in India.
2) Reach the point where one of us becomes really frustrated and get transferred to someone who's first language is English.
3) Reach the point where one of us becomes really frustrated and get transferred to someone who can actually affect any sort of account changes.
4) Threaten to switch to another ISP several times before finally getting the rate that's advertised on their website for "new customers only". (But is clearly something they're willing to accept for their services, so why should it only be for new customers and not for morons who've had their service for 8 years already.)

But today, the woman who answered the phone spoke English and actually knew where Philadelphia was - so we were already ahead of the game. She asked why I wanted to discontinue my cable TV and I told her that we just don't watch it enough to pay $50 a month for it and that we'd be using a rooftop antenna and Netflix in the future. The was no argument. Shocking. She asked if I'd looked into the pricing for internet service alone and I said I had - $39.99 for the first year, according to the RCN website. She said, "Yes, that's for new customers..." Oh great. Here is comes. But after a few (thousand) key strokes, she said, "Okay, it looks like in your area it's $39.99 a month for the accelerated internet service." Whaaa.... what?! That's it? Yup. She told me the address of a store where I could return my cable box to and that was that. No kidding.

So anyway, just wanted to give a big up to Charlotte for helping me to not have to be a jerk today. And here's to $50 more in the bank account each month that we can hopefully use to change the world instead of just rot our brains a little bit more.