we are hermits....or are YOU.....??

I'm not sure if you realize this, but we do not own a television.  Consequently, we don't have one in our home.  We certainly weren't the only Cambridge, MA dwellers who went TVless, but here in small town Indiana, well, let's just say, we're in the minority--the very small minority.  In fact, I would hazard a guess that there are fewer than a dozen homes in this town without a TV.  Okay, I'm totally making up that number.  But you get the point.

Because we have no TV, we generally have been solely paying for internet and phone services.  Recently, I had to make that semi-annual call to our provider to get the "best package"--you know.... how they rope you in with that super amazing deal and fail to mention that in one year (or sometimes less) that super amazing deal will completely vanish and your rates will either go soaring or gradually increase little by little so that you won't notice it until they ultimately drain your entire bank account.  (You don't hear skepticism in my voice, do you??)

Anyway, my annual call ended up not being what I quite expected and somehow when I got off the phone, we were going to be paying only a little bit less than we were but getting TV, phone and internet.  You might think, wow, GREAT deal!  All three for less than the two?  Yes.  Yes. I hope you're thinking that.  Because it really doesn't make sense.  And it really doesn't make sense that we couldn't get a BETTER deal on just the two services.  They really play you well, don't they?  So, I spent many consecutive  hours on the phone with people from the company trying to figure out why exactly we wanted this deal that they were so happy to give us.  (Many of the hours on the phone were attempts to actually get this "subscription" to actually work for us at our home.)

At this point, I have probably spent more than 10 hours in the past two weeks with this company, getting shuffled from one customer service agent to the next trying to solve my numerous dilemmas.  I believe that in essence, our problems all boil down to this one fact: we do not have a television.  And this greatly frustrates me.  It frustrates me to the point that I'm now actually spending an entire blog post on the matter.

Why do we have to own a TV?  Seems like such a useless piece of equipment when you can do almost all of the same things on a TV that you can do on the computer (at least in our house).  All these service agents at the company painted it like we were hermits and super strange--what if YOU'RE the strange ones!  You know, it's the people with the TVs who are sitting at home all day in front of them.  It's the people with their TVs on all day that are discouraging kids from getting outside and raising the obesity rate.  Shouldn't there be a movement against TVs??  I mean, instead of thinking we're some kind of freaks, why not stop to think about the reality of the culture we live in?  How much better would it be if fewer people had TV.  I'm not saying you can't watch things--in this house, we watch things online.  But the difference is that when you're watching something online, you have to think about it.  You have to be purposeful.  There's no flipping through channels and sitting there for hours.  You pick a show, you click on it, you watch it.  When it's over, you have to get up and go back to the computer.  That's not a nuisance; that's GOOD!

I'm starting to wonder if TV providers should be putting a portion of their profits into healthcare.  I mean, come on--you have to admit they are feeding this frenzy.  Giving away a bundle package of the three services at a lower price (or only dollars more) than the two; it's outrageous.  

But truth be told, I believe that the number of people looking to the internet for entertainment and media is growing.  Obviously at this point, most providers aren't prepared for that.  But if they don't recognize the wave coming, they're going to get washed up on shore with nothing left.  If these companies want to make the big bucks, they better figure out what's happening and act accordingly.  Otherwise, we're going to see a huge shift in the big money-makers we know today.  Some small start-up that's paying attention to the changing winds is going to snatch half their customers and start making their own billions.  (Remember Netflix??)