Unless you have Dish Network or Direct TV, you’re most likely a customer of two cable companies, Brighthouse Cable or Charter Cable. Charter is in the Hoover/ Vestavia area, or over the mountain if you will. I’m in Southside so that makes me a Brighthouse baby. Neither competes in each other’s market so they have a bit of a monopoly on the areas they are in. In other words, Brighthouse owns me. Brighthouse has made me it’s prison bitch on many an occasion and today is no different. Perhaps if there was less of a monopoly in my area, there would be more competition which would make for better service and more affordable prices. I’m sure it’s all a bunch of FCC rigmarole. It always is. The FCC is a powerful and shadowy organization with unlimited resources and the law in it’s iron grip. I bet the FCC had something to do with the Kennedy assassination. If I’m found dead after this article, you know who to look at.
I complained to Brighthouse that for the last month, my cable was consistently having problems. In fact, I’m writing this immediately after getting off the phone with an operator. I will say the operator was polite and professional. I didn’t yell at her or slam the phone down or any other such nonsense. She’s just doing her job and she did it well. She doesn’t own the company and make it’s rules, so I can’t take my frustrations out on her and be mean. I’ll save that for the cantankerous, apathetic, disorganized, patronizing broads at my landlord’s office. So I call my court appointed, government sanctioned, mandatory cable company to give them a piece of my mind. Not a big piece mind you. I’ve got so little left after giving a piece to my landlord who won’t rake the leaves this fall from last fall. I know this week’s column is about cable, but I can’t resist getting a dig in at my landlord. Now back to the topic at hand. I asked for a discount since the problems have been so frequent for so long. They won’t give me a discount based on a call I made now, for problems that have been happening for a whole month. Since there’s no record of a problem being called in, aBrighthouse won’t retroactively issue discounts or refunds. Part of this is my fault. One, I should have called in sooner and two I should’ve known the honor system only works in the take-a-penny leave-a-penny dish at the corner store.
The problem was the features that let you get shows on demand, restart programs, find shows, and remind you of upcoming shows. They either worked horribly or not at all. The operator not only refused to compensate me by discounting my bill, she said that Brighthouse couldn’t and doesn’t because of failure of these particular features. Why you ask? Because she said those features are free and you’re not charged for them. Yes, you heard me. The cable is very expensive but the features are free so they’re only charging me for cable even though without the cable the features are useless because I’d have nothing to use the features on if I didn’t have cable which is very expensive. Phew! I’ll give us both a chance to catch our breaths. Brighthouse is not charging me for something? I find that hard to believe. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the phrase “I find that hard to believe.” it’s code for I don’t believe that at all. Someone is scheduled to come out and fix it. According to them, they’ll have someone at my house tomorrow between 8:00 a.m. and April 2012.
You can sympathize with what I’m dealing with right? Since it may be hard to get across what I’m going through, I will demonstrate my interaction with Brighthouse in a little play. The following isn’t based on the conversation with the operator.
Let’s leave her out of it. She’s merely an innocent pawn in their game. This is between the consumer and the company itself. For this play, I will use two classic archetypes that best describe the relation between Brighthouse and a Brighthouse customer; a pimp and a prostitute.
Pimp: Bitch where my money? Don’t make Brighthouse have to slap a ho?
Prostitute: I’m sorry Brighthouse baby. You just want so much money and I seem to be the only one putting in all the effort. Not that I’m complaining.
Pimp: Don’t I give you everything? Security, peace of mind, a place to stay, four ESPN’s?
Prostitute: It’s just that the less I go out on the street corner for you, the more money you want from me. Plus it’s so cold baby.
Pimp: Cold? Bitch I told you to bundle up! Bundle up your cable, internet and home phone. How many times do I got to tell you ho’s, bundling makes economic sense.
Prostitute: Who has a home phone anymore anyway?
Pimp: I know what you mean? Don’t people know we live in a modern era. I’ll pimp slap somebody with a home phone! i Phone muthaf*cka, i Phone!
Annnnd scene. So less really is more. It’s more expensive to get cable without HBO than it is to get it with. Brilliant! Usually I can’t afford to buy more of something, but in this case I literally can’t afford to buy less cable. Notice how I used the word literally in it’s proper way? People hate when literally is misused as in “ I was so scared I literally shit a brick.” No one has ever literally passed a brick through their lower intestine. The worst offenders of misusing the word literally, are those nit wit Kardashians. But they do it in a whole new stupid way. The Kardashian mom on one episode said “I literally forgot to pick up Kim at the airport.” Of course you did you idiot! No can figuratively forget to pick up someone at the airport! I’ve never turn to someone and said, “ I forgot to pick up Kim at the airport. If you know what I mean?” nudge, nudge, wink wink. So to use the word correctly, I literally hate cable companies. Not as much as I hate the Kardashians, but it’s a close second. I’m gonna have to get rid of cable anyway. It’s just too damned expensive and I’m too damned poor right now. So that’s one less company that I’ll have to struggle with and one less outlet for my hate. But I don’t hate everything. I literally love you all. Figuratively speaking of course.
“Here’s the thing…” is a weekly column featuring humor and commentary by Christopher Davis, comedian and host of Fresh Ground Comics and View of the City. Send your feedback to chris@bhamweekly.com
