You never really know how much you are loved until you tell an expensive service provider where to jam it. You certainly don’t get an inkling of their love for you when they’re confident you are going to keep paying.
No, it’s a sudden and fierce passion that ignites in their breast when you answer their query as to why you are ending the relationship with:
“It’s not me, it’s you. Actually, I’ve always felt that your service sucked. I was just forced into having it because there was no reception in our valley and we had to have cable just to get free-to-air. But now, my aerial’s been fixed and new splitter boxes put through the place, so I’m just going to do with HD free-to-air.”
“Have you heard about our deal where we supply an IQ recorder and…”
“Why would I want to record things that are endlessly repeated? I made a deal with myself that I would only order in pizza when you played The Golden Child. I put on 11 kilos last year. And just for the record, I don’t believe that On the Buses is technically comedy, anymore.”
In the week between my phone call to cancel and the day we'd paid up until they rang me, pleading, three times. Yet you couldn’t get them on the phone for love or money when you had a problem… no surprises there.
Another reason I was happy to be rid of the cable-TV supplier is the budget. I don’t have one, and neither does Emergency Contact and we’re not the types to ever go and get one, but it felt responsible and adult and the right thing to do.
So, to celebrate our tight fiscal restraint, I bought a hard disk, high definition, digital recorder thingy - and I lurv it. The special kind of lurv that a boy has for a new gadget.
(I’ve got a tip for you here, ladies. If you are at a loss what to get your fella for Christmas or birthday or whatever, let me supply you with an absolutely foolproof set of rules for pleasing a hetero man. Is the present you have in mind made of cloth? It is wrong. Does the present you have in mind need electricity running through it? You are right.)
In my new found maturity, I sat down and read the instructions (because I wanted the whole tuning process to go smoothly. Nothing more annoying than a telly thing that doesn’t pick up telly. Oh, and there are more output choices on the back of the thing than a PC).
My confidence in the manufacturers took a bit of a hit, however, when I read the below on page 7 of the user guide:
Before going any further, check that you have received the following items with your digital receiver. ("Fair enough", I think to myself. Let’s take stock. Let’s do a little inventory. Sounds like fun.)
- Remote control unit (Check. Awww, shiny. Oooh, look at all those buttons with strange symbols on them.)
- Two batteries for the remote control (AAA 1.5V. Bastard! I hate AAA. They’re the little… oooh, look at all the buttons on the remote.)
- One Power Cord (Yes. Handy.)
- One loop cable to connect the first tuner with the second tuner (Loop cable! Two tuners! I just made a mess.)
- One component RCA cable (Colours on this thing I’ve never seen on an AV cable. This cable, is in fact, going to cost me a lot of money. See, it’s got more connections than the back of my old telly offers. You know what that means… new telly.)
- One USB wireless module (Yes sportsfans, it hooks into your wireless LAN and you can treat it like an FTP server and drive it remotely through its web site. That mess isn’t getting any smaller.)
- A copy of this user guide (WTF! How am I reading this list if I don't have the user guide? Idiots!)
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