HDTV not HGTV
About a month ago I wrote about my cable company trying to cheat me out of $2.99 a month for a stupid digital adapter box that I didn’t need. I managed to get them to stop charging me the money because one or two adapters were supposed to be free.
I also hoped that in the end I wouldn’t need it. You know what they say about hope? “Hope in one hand & bleep in the other.” By the end of the month all the HD versions of the regular channels disappeared and if you wanted to watch the lo-def versions you needed the adapter. This is no good. Once your eyes have feasted on tasty 16:9 crystal clear images, you just can’t go back to a 4:3 fuzzy-wuzzy picture.
Not wanting to give AtlanticBB the satisfaction I hoped maybe a newer amplified Mohu Leaf would pull in all the local channels unlike the regular Leaf we tried 5 years ago. This way we would keep the high-speed internet and drop the TV portion of the bill. Well you know what they say about hope? Unlike 5 years ago with the non-amplified Leaf, this time we got the local Fox affiliate great, but NBC was nowhere to be found. To top it off ABC worked well only most of the time.
Giving up, I called Atlantic Broadband and asked what do I have to do to get local channels in high definition. Right now we are paying $132 for the Limited TV package and the 125Mb internet, but if I wanted to drop the internet down to 100Mb we could get the “Essentials Package” which would be the Limited TV in HD and they’ll toss in HBO and EPIX for $95…for the first 2 years, then it goes up $5 bucks a month until it gets back to $130ish…at which time we will no doubt have to call and beg for a lower rate for a different package.
Our appointment was scheduled for 2:30 to 5:30pm yesterday and I certainly hoped whoever showed up to do the work would be better than the last time these chuckle-heads had to come into our house. This time, like a Vegas slot machine paying out a few coins, hope won.
Al was pleasant, competent, and went above and beyond. The only possible bad thing I could say about our hour and forty-five minutes together is he reeked of cigarette smoke when you got near him. Because our signal strength was only marginally acceptable he went outside and climbed the pole across the street. From up there he removed a couple of old filters (that are no longer used anyway.) He also ran a ground wire from the new splitter he put on the house to the ground on the electric meter instead of the ground stake (which is not to code) that Mutt and Jeff didn’t fix 4-1/2 years ago. He then made up a couple of new RG-6 coax lines to replace my interior runs, just because.
We have the same channels as we did before, only now in glorious HD. We now also have 5 channels of HBO and 4 of Epix which we will probably hardly ever watch, but I left them in lineup of channels that we will scan through while surfing using the remote, so who knows.
Somewhere along the line when I was telling Donna what we were getting HDTV, either I mis-spoke or she mis-heard, so she was disappointed when I told her we don’t get HGTV even though everytime we are in a hotel room in which that channel is available, she will invariably remark, “I’ve already seen this one.”