2014-11-03

Xfinity=Evil: My Cable Experience

Here comes another mini-rant about First World Problems. If that's a trigger for you, and I hear you, and don't blame you, you'll want to skip this one. 

However if you hate giant evil corporations that constantly swindle good people out of their hard-earned cash, please help me spread the word.

What word?

In a word: Comcast. 

2nd word: Sucks.

Implied: Balls full time.
This is THEE MOST RAPEY van ever, but they rape grown people with their service and rates.
From a blog called ... wait for it...Comcastsucksballs.blogspot.com
That is a link for more glorious, and totally TRUE rants about Com-crap.
Crime-cast is our choice of cable company, and like most monopolies, they are the worst. Xfinity is a name that Comcast recently chose for themselves to hide behind, after word spread about their horrible business practices, over-priced highway robbery schemes and reprehensible customer service. Same company, same core of pure molten greed, new catchy name. Like when Prince changed his name to a symbol. 

Why Xfinity? 
Because that is what is even LONGER than INFINITY. 

Which is how long you'll wait for them to:
Show up;
Do what you pay for;
Provide any kind of service;
Update their gee-dee OnDemand suckhole;
Put you through to a person on the phone, when inevitably one or more of their products doesn't perform as promised, and you have to starting the long process to try to get what you already paid for

They recently swindled my husband for yet more money on their latest hoax: The X1 whatever it is. What it actually is, is an even more advanced way for them to control what you see, when, and how you watch, and also throw more commercials at your face. How can a cable company force you to watch commercials? I'll get to that.

My husband just thinks I'm a cheapo, and admittedly I may be a bit jaded against this particularly expensive secret satanic succubus of a company. I started thinking about why I hate them so very much. I mean, I like the concept of television. I like high-speed internet. I'm generally a fan of technology. That is to say, I like it when it actually does improve our lives as it promises while steepling it's fingers and dreaming of stealing our hard-earned money.

I feel like I should provide a little bit of personal history before I go all Dave Savini and expose their shoddy business practices, and thinly-veiled robbery. That's only fair, right?

I'll admit the entire concept of paying for television hasn't sat well with me for decades. I've never had much of what marketers call disposable income.  In my adult life, I never had cable most of the time before my husband. As a single mom it was not something I ever cared about. 
from TVtropes.com
When I was younger we had cable, I remember. I never thought about the cost, because that's one of the bonuses childhood provides. To me, we just suddenly had tons of new channels, and we could change the channel while sitting on the couch! The control box, for lack of a better word, was never 'remote,' as it was way to0 heavy to carry around. It was the size of a typewriter, (Google what a typewriter is, youngins) and attached to long cords. I can't believe I found a picture of it, this really takes me back.
Our first "remote." You could NEVER lose this remote! It was always on the coffee table.
It was the only thing that would FIT on the entire table. from blog.tulsatvmemories.com
You had to set the dial to UHF, VHF and whatever the 3rd one was, and then find the right button. I'm not sure if we ever had the right sticker to tell us which channels were where. If we did, then like everything in our house it got trashed right away. We just counted "4 buttons from the left on the middle setting is MTV" and whatnot. 
Right?! from 8tracks.com

Also? While we're strapped into the way-back machine and my old wrinkled hand is turning into a fist to shake, can I just point out that back then MTV had music videos
And only music videos. 

Well, a little bullshittery labeled "Music News" from the VJ's, but no reality shows or pregnant teens or anything else I hear about today. Eventually they had silly game shows kind of about music, but mostly music videos. It was a great time to be alive.

I could spin yarns about the awesome 80's, it's TV shows and candy disguised as breakfast cereal all damn day, but I'll save those stories for my grandkids. Or maybe at least just until I finish my rant about the cable company.

At some point in my early 20's, I knew a guy that 'knew a guy' and we had this magic black box that would get us every single cable channel for free. It also magically-slash-illegally unlocked every Pay-Per-View movie and fight! That was awesome. Cable television is worth every single penny when you're stealing it. Morally it's not stealing, it's a drop in the Karma Bucket of how this company needs to be painfully penetrated in every possible orifice. 

Point is, when given the choice to actually pay what they're charging for what they call programming? I always opted OUT. Early this century when I was dating my now husband, he tricked me into the concept of paying for cable. 

He eventually got sick of slumming in my cinder block prison style apartment, where technology and cell phone coverage came to die. It was a tiny, cheap place that I had to paint myself when I moved in because I didn't have enough in my savings account to cover a deposit. They gave me the paint though! Bonus.

Cheap tip: You can negotiate ANYTHING.

Anyway, this apartment was about the worst. I literally chose it because it had thee cheapest rent in my son's school district. I've talked about the registered sex offender 2 buildings over, the horrible tiny laundry room, and how it backed up (10 yards away, tops) to a strip mall with a bar. 

Most nights you could hear a loud clattering of broken glass when the bar emptied the garbage cans of beer bottles into the dumpster. Having music or TV on to drown out that sound a little was very helpful.

I loved that crappy apartment though. Because of reasons that would take up a whole post, at least, mostly because it was ALL MINE. My name alone was on the lease. It was just me and my son for the first time since he was born. 

I could do whatever I want, as long it was appropriate to take a small boy along, whenever I wanted. We could come and go as we saw fit. We went everywhere, did all the things, visited everyone, I took him volunteering and felt like a long-term parolee finally out of prison and into the sun for the first time in decades. Prison being my first marriage. 

I felt like we didn't need to pay for cable television because when we were home at our apartment, we spent all our time either working on his homework or finding any other place to do our laundry. Also, everything in my apartment was crap. It was all previously owned and thrown away by someone else. 

Remember the old toaster that would SHOOT the toast in the air? Yeah, that was rad. I'll post a link to that at the end if you missed it, it was fantastic. It was the Dream: The Toast Dream.
from animationplayhouse
For televisions I had one TV/DVD player combo my mother gave me as a present, that looked like this. Compare the size of the DVD slot to the whole screen.  


thehireshop.eu
I loved the shit out of this. It was the ONLY time in my entire life I've had a television in my bedroom. I liked that for some weird reason. If I couldn't sleep, I watched TV.

We borrowed DVDs from the library, which were FREE! And also Lion Video, which was cheap, and ALL KIDS MOVIES WERE FREE with a rental of a non-kid movie. 

The other tiny TV, like everything else I owned, either came from a resale shop or my dad found it in the garbage. Probably the latter. 
Like this, but my TV was older and smaller.
It fit on a corner of my dresser. from sodahead.com
My old man was a pro-level dumpster diver. Story for another time. 

The TV had the rabbit ears with tin foil on the top, yes post-Y2K, and we got 2, sometimes 3 channels on a clear day.

It seemed beyond ridiculous to pay for cable for these tiny televisions, for the small amount of time we would actually watch television. 

But oh yeah, my manfriend. I didn't have a land phone line or internet connection, so my boy-man-friend was unable to track his four - yes 4 - fantasy football leagues. 

Talk about the real hashtag-struggle. White guys, right? 

Anyway, I guess he was feeling cocky after finally being able to meet my son, SIX MONTHS after we were dating, or else mayhaps he always wanted to play Sugar Daddy so he paid for cable.  But only during football season. Let's not forget my Prince Charming was/is a pretty huge a-hole. I'm not saying I'm just saying. I mean, we wouldn't have fallen in love if he wasn't. 

Well, by the time football season was over my lawyer was finally able to squeeze blood from a turnip and I finally got my divorce settlement, and I had bought my own condo. 

In hindsight, if I had co-habitated with the manfriend, I would have saved myself a giant pile of money. Not only on cable, but also the thousands upon thousands it costed to buy and sell a condo at the worst possible time in human history. 

This was right before the housing market crash. No one saw that coming. I don't care what your sketchy uncle says that never could get a loan to own anything for himself: NO ONE SAW THAT COMING, Bro. 

Anyway, once Daddy Warbucks stopped paying for cable, I decided to cough up the dough myself and we got used to having cable again. I was almost glad to be hooked to the Boob Tube. I could use the appeal of television to bribe my son to do his homework a little faster. 

Also, being a homeowner meant budgeting, and not going out as much. It was nice to have choices of entertainment while home in my OWN HOME that I owned, and beamed with pride about. I bought a clearance computer and we even had INTERNET ACCESS. I felt like an heiress. 
Not THAT heiress. Well, not that far actually....
I did have only ONE male companion. At that time.
image from landoverbaptist.net
I was very proud of myself. My dumb-self was getting it together. I was a single mother who owned my own condo. I was able to buy new furniture for literally the first time in my entire life, and I had even acquired a full-sized (19-inch) TV! My mother gave me her old set that had been struck by lightening. True story. 
F'real, Dory. from allaboutgiulia dotwordpress dotcom
At that time it didn't bother me to pay for extra things. I was making good money, and all Tina Turner on her own and all too happy to flush a large amount of money down the Com-crap toilet. I told myself at least it wasn't *snooty voice* The Dish. 

When I was newly single, my mother and I rented a townhouse and she had THE DISH. Have you had The Dish? It's a good idea, until it rains or there's so much as a light breeze. Then the picture gets all fuzzy or just doesn't work at all. 

Somehow the picture went fuzzy at the end of baseball season. When our Chicago White Sox were in the WORLD SERIES. I thought my husband's head was going to explode. 
These thieves also cancel whole networks without warning.
from jodiambroseblog.com
He took a very serious vow that we would "NEVER HAVE A DISH" if he had anything to say about it. 10 years later, he's held true to this vow. If you ask him about that game, or The Dish, you can still see tiny tendrils of smoke coming out of his ears in memory. 

Somehow I didn't 'know a guy' who could get us an illegal box, or maybe I tried to convince myself I was better than that (hahahahaha) so I sucked the Comcast overpriced teet. This started my hate/white.hot.hate relationship with C*ntcast. 

That was the beginning of the end for me cable-wise.

This picture b-the-w is from Finding Nemo, a very popular Disney movie. The only way you can see this movie on Comcast? Is if you pay them $20. That's $20 ON TOP of your monthly subscription fees + pay cable stations. They say then you OWN it, which is hilarious because you can ONLY ever watch it on a Comcast box. Until you cancel service. Then it's gone forever.

This reminds me of a window company trying to charge you to look at rainbow because you're watching it through their window. 

But hey, now you own a rainbow.

TO BE CONTINUED.

_____________________
I will tell you how my relationship w/them went down (and I mean down, as in straight South) and developed a callous of pure, unadulterated rage against the machines in my next post. 

My flashbacking kind of derailed the rant train, and this post is already biblically long though not as full of lies. Hopefully I'll get time to finish before next Monday morning, but somehow I doubt it. This is a crazy week. 

26 comments:

  1. I haven't had cable in years. I don't miss it a bit.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good for you! I'm with you. Nothing on television is worth it these days anyway. And if there is something, like The Walking Dead or Star Wars Rebels, eventually they'll come to Netflix or DVD. You just have to avoid spoilers on social media! Or read the books as I had to do with Game of Thrones.

      Delete
  2. This is why I only subscribe to super fast Internet service and stream everything online. Cable, dish - they all want to screw you over. Why let people pick and choose the channels they want to watch and pay for those ala carte when you can pay $100 a month for a huge, unnecessary package that includes 10 channels you'll actually watch and 590 you'll never even take a glimpse at?

    "As a white guy that only speaks English, thanks, Comcast, for including 30 Spanish channels in my package that I don't want or need! I really appreciate having to constantly flip past those when I'm watching TV!"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. YES! That's another thing, their packages are chock full o'CRAP no one wants to see. I hate paying for crap I will never, ever possibly watch. And on top of that you're going to make me watch commercials? PASS.

      Delete
  3. I have Time Warner Cable. It, too, sucks.

    Wanna hear more suckage?

    COMCAST is buying TWC!

    I think I'll ram a Samurai sword through my ears.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. OH I'm so sorry! You're in for a world of hurt. Unless you go the Netflix route. I would do that if I were you!

      Delete
    2. After reading the other comments, I think I'll stick to the Samurai sword.

      Delete
    3. Good call. P.S. I would watch that show!!

      Delete
  4. Comcast sent out the new boxes without debugging them and left to the customers! Bastards are constantly keeping us on hold forever to tell them the problems and eventually coming out with an update. Most aggravating company we deal with.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They always do that. Ours were all effed up. That's in the next post. We couldn't get freaking Sesame Street! That's a FREE goddamn show, you a-holes! Al was on hold so long his phone went dead. We had to start an online ticket to fix it. FOUR days later. Grrrr.

      Delete
  5. I Can.Not.Wait. My hatred for the Cast also runs deep.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They are one of the worst companies I've ever dealt with, and I used to use a robot bank that literally had NO home office or telephone number you could call for service.

      Delete
  6. Friends of ours in the US have wifi, a cheap laptop hooked up to the TV with some kind of connector and they just watch programs and movies from online websites on the TV via the laptop. No cable. Costs them next to nothing, I believe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That is a great plan! You have to know what shows to watch though and that was part of our problem. It took us so long to find a show I was half asleep before we started watching anything :)

      Delete
  7. Yes, yes, YES! I have Comcast and it sucks. They keep jacking up the prices and add on all these stupid little hidden charges in the bill. They quoted us one price, which lasted maybe two months, and next thing I knew, the bill kept climbing. My biggest beef with them is how often I lose my internet connection (the death knoll to any blogger). I do miss the days when MTV was actually music instead of realty crap TV. Funny and totally relatable post for me!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes! We lose connection all the time. Mostly just for a few minutes now, but back in my condo? It would be DAYS sometimes. They might eventually send someone out but you had to take a whole day off work to wait for them!

      Delete
  8. Interesting that someone started an entire blog dedicated to why Comcast sucks! I tend to agree with you, even though that is the service my parents use, and therefore the one that I am stuck using. I don't get the whole "digital library" thing where you can own a movie without really owning it. I mean if you wanted to OWN the movie, you could just go buy the DVD or something, right? Do people still buy DVD's?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We buy some DVDs, but a lot of people prefer digital with kid movies because the kids can't lose or break the disks! I just don't like the idea of buying the same movie again. If you buy a Disney BluRay they give you a BluRay disk and a DVD. That's nice. Until both of those are obsolete VCRs.

      Delete
  9. We have the C*ntcast problems, too. I hate this freaking cable company. They offered the new and improved wireless fast-as-shite modem and you could choose to self install (very worst idea ever) or set up an appointment to have a C*ntcast service d1ck come and do it. So, (stupid me) I click the link to set up an appointment and lo! The next page said "thank you for ordering your self install modem. It will be delivered in the next 4-6 weeks". Three days later it shows up. It is still in the box. There is so much bastardness in this company. I want to ditch all of it except the internet and just stream NetFlix but the husband is addicted to CNN, The Weather Channel and HGTV. Ok, I'm the one who loves HGTV but I could live with out it since most of it is online anyway. And yea, every other month the bill goes up a couple of dollars. I can't wait for the rest of this post!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UGH! We've had stuff like that. And WORSE! SOOOO many issues, getting set up, with the service, CALLING service makes you want to slit your wrists, cancelling service, equipment collection that never happened. I literally can't even include every problem I've had with them or I would never stop writing! hahahaha

      Delete
  10. Will you hit me if I take the opportunity to be a *little* bit smug? #NoTv

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not at all! My cousin Sally hasn't had a TV for decades! More power to you! 99% of it sucks on toast. That's part of the reason I hate paying for it!

      Delete
  11. Oh my God! Jeff's daughter just went off to college and there were two choices for cable in the dorm room. His ex chose Comcast. It wasn't hooked up but because she had the equipment there was a balance on the account. It took my husband A WEEK to get a live person on the phone to actually figure out what the shit was going on and finally get the service hooked up so there was a reason to actually get a bill! Horrible, horrible customer service. It's like the 10th circle of hell. I just told him about this post and the Comcast sucks balls site and he literally shivered!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UGH. Typical of them. I had a BEYOTCH of a time getting them to cancel at my condo, and getting set up here. I'll finish that next week but same kind of thing. They're the WORST.

      Delete
  12. I hope it wasn't you who spray-painted that white van!! I share your frustration with Cable/Sky TV companies, although I think it would help if I was a bit more tech-savvy. It's always a nightmare when things don't work properly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That van is from the sight comcastsucksballs.blogspot.com which is an entire blog dedicated to venting about problems with Comcast. That is how bad they are.
      I doubt the level of tech savvy would help much. My husband is a Business Systems Analyst, who marries different technologies and systems for a living, and we struggle with Comcast's issues. They're like Microsoft, they roll out the latest and greatest and rely on customer feedback to work out the bugs. But then you get the added pleasure of waiting on hold for hours to report problems. Frustrating.

      Delete