Tag: cable

Do You Want to Connect

Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?
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Life before the net. Do I remember those dark, soulless days? Oh, yeah. I remember those days, just as I recall life without the world wide web, life without cable and DVDs, life without CDs, eight-track and cassette tapes, life without microwaves, and life without cell phones and more than three networks. I remember life without remote controls, which my wife calls, the clicker.

Yes, I remember buying my first personal computer. I remember using the first one at home. Then I recall signing us up for Compuserve and Mindnet. I remember getting my first email address and having no one to email. That soon changed. Viagra offers quickly found my inbox. With it came an understanding of something non-meaty called ‘Spam’ and wealthy Nigerians in need of money.

Yes, I remember pre-net life. Primarily because our TV schedule was fixed according to the cable schedule. Cheers on Thursday, for example. But when the net came into its full flowering, I was able to find a huge variety of things to stream from around the world, watching them when I wanted, instead of waiting for their schedule. Long as I was willing to pay for it.

With the net, the days of going to the front door and looking for the daily newspaper disappeared. There was no need for all that inked paper to stack up and get put out for the trash. Now the news was right there online. I didn’t need to wait until 6 PM to check to see what was happening. Of course, information about what was happening locally soon began fading. We could no longer just pick up the paper and turn to the police log to see what the hell the sirens were all about the other day. No, that faded. Now, there are sometimes stories on Facebook or Nextdoor. Some others are struggling to bring the local news back to us. It’s a challenge. Many efforts arise and fall.

Freedom came with online ordering, too. I no longer needed to prowl through brick and mortar stores, making comparisons, trying to figure out what to buy. Boom, the net was heavy with choices. It was still onerous in the early days to compare things but then came Amazon… Suddenly, whoa. It was a desperate consumer’s dream.

Do you know what it was like to travel in pre-net days? Calling the airlines to get price checks, listening to them look up schedules for you, explaining options? Same with hotels. Expedia and the like made it easier…for a while. But wherever money and humans are involved with money transactions and information, others are there to scam us for their share of the pie.

Yes, I remember life before the net. It was simpler and harder, easier, and more problematic. That’s how it always is with progress. Each step unfolds with new and surprising insights, and the things we used to do begin to fade.

Just think: one day, people will be asking, do you remember life before AI?

And someone will reply, I remember the days before cars. And then we’ll all wonder, what was that like, and turn to AI for the answer.

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The Cycles of Mail

The cycles of life came in the mail. Credit card invitations when he was young. Cable and Internet deals in his middle age. House and window cleaning services as he aged, followed by landscaping and financial planning, then house-painting and payday loans.

As he reached his mid-fifties, AARP became friendly, as did companies like Prudential, offering planning assistance, worrying if he was saving enough for retirement. Cruise and vacation suggestions came every week. Everyone became concerned about his estate and his will. Hearing-aid flyers were frequently received. Then came funeral and cremation services, with coupons and discounts!

Reaching his mid-sixties brought flyers and letters for Medicare plans. Of course, every two years through it all were pieces from politicians, PACs, and political parties asking for a little money, pleading their cases, railing against one another, and demanding change.

Coming with weekly persistence regardless of the year or his age were advertisements from his local stores, catering to the holidays and time of year.

Fondly he remembered his past mail as he perused the latest offering from an assisted living residence and dropped it into the recycling bin, letting his imagination run wild about what his future mail would bring.

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Just Sayin’

I think some people miss the point behind cutting the cable.

Cutting the cable has been around for a while. It’s an expression used when you decide to terminate cable service. That would’ve once been unthinkable. When I was a child — yeah, here we go.

I’m a boomer, in my sixties. I’ve seen the rise of the microwave and electronics. Cable television came to my neighborhood while I was in high school. Before cable, we were dependent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. One of those networks had two channels in our area.

Reruns were the norm. “Bonanza”, “Gunsmoke”, “Gilligan’s Island”, and “Perry Mason” came on throughout the day, along with every version of a Lucille Ball’s offerings, game shows like “Jeopardy” and “Password”, and talks shows like “The Merv Griffin Show”. As this was a rural, churchy area, so we also had a lot of gospel music sang off-key with with a twang, and plenty of Bible thumping.

Cable, then, expanded our ability to watch different reruns on other channels. We had, I think, thirty-two channels and we paid about twenty dollars a month. None were ‘premium’ channels; HBO, Showtime, and offerings like that were just being thought of and begun in those days. It didn’t come to my area until I’d left the area in 1974.

Still, cable offered us more. That was the point. Then, the point became, cable is offering the same thing over and over, or offering us things that doesn’t interest us. Upon returning to the United States after some overseas assignment, my wife and I subscribed to cable television. It was pretty good for a while. A&E was delivering fresh BBC television shows like “Ballykissangel” and “Doctor Who”. TBS provided reruns. “Original” programming was still a number of years away, along with reality shows.

Off we went to somewhere else outside the U.S. This time, upon returning, we signed up for cable, with some premium offerings.

It was no longer a sweet deal. The price had jumped to over fifty dollars a month. Pausing to put that into perspective, my income was about twenty-five thousand. Our new sports car cost fifteen thousand. Our phone bill (cell phones weren’t on the scene yet) was about twenty-five dollars a month. So fifty a month was a chunk.

Back to cable. Premium movies had already been seen, so I was paying for movie reruns, and they showed them over and over and over. The cable company boasted that we had one hundred channels. Our point was, there was nothing on that we wanted to watch.

That trend worsened, in my mind. We went to a hundred and forty plus channels, two hundred channels, dozens of premium offerings. Prices climbed, but nothing was on. By the time I cut the cable, we’d curtailed the premium offerings. No reason to subscribe because they offered so little. By then, we could rent videos, and then discs at Blockbusters and other places. Eventually, Netflix evolved.

We cut the cable ten years ago. I went with Roku and subscribed to Netflix. I remain a Netflix subscriber. I also subscribe to Hulu basic and Amazon Prime. Others come and go, usually for a month at a time. I’m not the demographic target, though; I have no interest in watching television on my phone.

I monitor streaming offerings, and frequently try them out on a trial basis. They’ve become bloated and useless. Let’s talk SlingTV as an example. They’re offering over a hundred channels for just $65 a month. But looking at them, I know that I’ll end up watching very little of that.

The same happens with countless offerings. They think signing on to more channels is a big deal. It’s not; it goes back to the same problem that plagued us when we had four channels: nothing was on that we wanted to watch.

Original programming helps the situation these days. So does stealing ideas from other countries or importing television series and movies from other countries. As we discovered with A&E, and then BBC America, the rest of the world has fantastic stuff. In example, one show that’s currently doing well in the U.S. in “The Masked Singer”. Just as “Survivor” was an import, so is “The Masked Singer”; it came from Korea.

In the end, this is another rant, innit? Just an aging American musing about the ways that the world does and doesn’t change.

At least with remotes, it’s easier to change the channel. You know what we had to do when I was in high school?

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Never

Never is a big word, easily used. “I’m never going to Texas,” she said. “It’s full of racists and rednecks.”

I have family in Texas. They are somewhere on the spectrum of both of those things. Reliable Republicans, they think whites are getting a raw deal and distrust the M&Ms of Mexicans and Muslims. They’ve never actually experienced deprivation, never went hungry or without a roof, but still, they hear stories.

“I’m never riding on trains. They’re so dangerous.”

This was brought on by a train wreck in Spain that killed four. Wrecks happen. They’re never riding on trains because of an accident. What does that leave? Cars, bikes and planes? Because no one has ever been killed using those. People walking are killed, as are people in bed, suffering from nature’s attacks (quakes, tornadoes, hurricanes) to human events (gas line explosion). What are you going to do, hole up so you don’t die, with a plan to live forever?

I’ve jumped on the Never train many times (oooh, like that as a title for something, “The Never Train”), irked by Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, IBM, Comcast, HP, United, Delta, AT&T, Geico, McDonalds, Hillary, Trump, Republicans, Democrats, the NFL, the Senate, the House, the SCOTUS, Obama, Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Monsanto, police shootings, mass shootings, terrorist bombs, drone attacks…. Never comes easily but it’s rarely forever.

“I’m never going to stop drinking coffee,” I say, but with the rust disease, who knows? Yesterday, I bought a quad shot mocha for over five dollars, a bottle of wine for six dollars, and a pint of beer for six dollars. The QSM was purchased on the road in another town. “Too much,” I said, with a grimace, but held back from loosing the N word. “Six dollars for a bottle of Pinot Noir?” I asked. Seems too good to be true but I refrained from saying, “You can never get a good wine for six dollars.” It was hard to not say. Six dollars for a pint of Ninkasi Sinister Black Ale? That seemed steep, too. What is my Never point, I wondered.

My wife illuminated the never point in later conversations. While the prices of coffee, wine, beer (and gas) were striking, we have money that provide us a large comfort zone. The prices are noted and shrugged off. Sure, the comfort zone experienced a little nibble on the edge, but it’s a broad space, and that makes strides of difference.

We remembered when a car repair would mean a budget analysis to see what we would do without or reduce to save enough money to fix the car. Pennies were hoarded to purchase a treat, like ice cream at DQ. We didn’t drink wine, rarely drank beer, and our coffee was bought for fifty cents a cuppa. We never thought any of that would change.

But life is full of nevers. We never imagined video games being such a massive business, with their primary demographics being adults. We never thought Ashland would have the country’s record high, 108 degrees F. We never thought we’d track and study wildfires and El Nino and La Nina, never thought we’d quit subscribing to cable television, never thought a friend would do the things she had, never thought violence would come to our neighborhood. But it all happened.

So, I think, as I write like crazy and work, saying never rarely holds. I don’t think I’ll never say never again, but I will be more mindful about it.

At least, I’ll try, because always is a lot like never.

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