No More Free Cable

A couple of months ago the cable company was doing some work near my house and accidentally left the cable turned on. It was great I love free cable. Unfortunately they realized their error earlier this Wednesday, switched it back off and left me a lovely letter advising me that a routine inspection had discovered their error and they had fixed it. They did, however, offer to switch my cable back on in exchange for vast sums of money. I won't be taking them up on that.

It remind me of some other experiences I've had with free cable...

The condo DevilBoy and I rented when we lived in Toronto was brand new, we were the first people to live there. It had the normal amount of new building teething problems and mess ups, but was the nicest place I've ever lived and I miss it.

After we'd moved in DevilBoy and I had decided that we didn't want to pay to have the cable switched on. In the place I'd moved from I'd gone a year with just rabbit ears and had been happy with that. I really didn't see the added value I'd get from sending forty of my hard earned dollars each month to a company owned by one of the richest men in Canada. So we used the rabbit ears and found that to be perfectly adequate.

One of the little snafus in the building, however, was that when the cable was installed in the building it was installed switched on. Something neither the cable company nor DevilBoy and I were aware of. I don't remember why we tried it, but after around a year of using the rabbit ears we did try it and were rather shocked to discover that we had full cable! It was great, it was free, and all we'd had to do was actually plug the silly thing in. The cable company hadn't noticed in a year and, to my knowledge, never did notice.

I was spending a lot of time with WereGirl at the time. Both because I enjoyed her company and because I was (completely unsuccessfully) trying to convince her to date me. When I told her about the free cable, she was a little jealous and wondered if we could hook hers up like that too without the cable company noticing. I agreed to try.

Hooking up the cable wasn't much of a problem. Once I found the box, I took out the little filter piece and Voila! Free cable! For about a month.

I think one of WereGirl's neighbours must have seen me messing with her cable box and narc'ed to the cable company, because about a month later her roommate got a phone call from them in the middle of the day. They told her that they suspected something and were sending someone over to check it out right away. She called WereGirl at work, WereGirl called me at my desk (We worked for the same company) I called her roommate and at first tried to walk her through the procedure for re-installing the filter piece. Unfortunately her hands just weren't strong enough to undo the wires. Feeling slightly panicked, I left my desk, told my co-workers I'd be back in a bit (fortunately my boss was out for the day) and hailed a cab to WereGirl's place.

When I got there I discovered that my hands were also, as it turns out, too weak to undo the wires. This wasn't good. The cable man would be there at any second, and the cable was still hooked up. In desperation I called DevilBoy, hoping against hope that he did not have a gig that day and was home. DevilBoy has tools and is capable of building and wiring an entire house, should the need arise, so he could certainly help here. Fortunately, he was home.

"Can you come to WereGirl's place with your pliers right away?" I asked in a tone that made it clear that this wasn't really a question.

"Uh, sure" he responded.

For several agonizing minutes I wondered who would get there first, the cable man or DevilBoy.

DevilBoy did. I showed him what needed to be done and with the proper tools he was able to do it with ease. And after we discovered that I had instructed him to put the filter in the wrong place, he was able to remove it again and put it in the right place, also with ease.

If the cable man did ever show up he didn't announce himself and would have found everything in order.

That was the end of WereGirl's free cable, just as Wednesday was the end of mine.