I haven’t posted in a while, but the big news I finally cancelled my cable TV service after 20 something years! Thanks to Comcast’s infinite money grabbing ways, they would happily let me stay on a data plan with usage caps forever until I “upgraded” to a new unlimited plan, which finally prompted me to deal with them. For months now I rarely watch actual TV, it’s all been YouTube and Plex videos. I used to keep the news on as background noise but that has long been dominated by politics and yelling, I’ve had enough of it. Between briefly catching up on CNN in the morning and watching the rather good “x That Build America” series in the evenings it’s just not worth the $140/mo I was getting gouged for.
Of course in our AI hellhole world cancelling cable was difficult. “Just use the website” they say. The website only offers ways to add/upgrade cable/internet/mobile plans, no way to subtract. The “Comcast assistant” is utterly useless, it’s not even a chat bot, it’s a bunch of pre-selected prompts to click through. The “live assistant” isn’t any better, when I tried to use it it errored out but at least dropped a phone number to use. Unfortunately it took 6 tries before the number actually worked. It would answer and then immediately disconnect. Fortunately when I did finally get through to a human it was fairly quick work to tell them what I wanted and there was no haggling.
It does feel rather weird turning on the TV out of habit and not having a channel lineup anymore. But at least I’m saving a lot of money and no longer have a data cap! We’ll see how long it lasts before I give in and relapse to TV society.
