This past weekend, I cut the cable cord.
And immediately broke into a cold sweat.
“Could I do it?” I wondered while fighting the urge to curl into the fetal position and suck my thumb. Could I possibly exist without a hundred or so channels of completely useless drivel (that I never watch) sitting there waiting for me on the other side of my TV screen? Could I survive?
Of course, when I took just a moment to stop hyperventilating, I reminded myself that there was once a time in my youth when TV only had three channel options. And that was also a time when TV was plucked right out of thin air, as free as it was mindless. All we had to do was put up with a few dumb commercials in a given half-hour of Mork & Mindy or Dukes of Hazzard, and it didn’t cost us anything more than a few random brain cells and the pennies it took to power the set.
Nowadays, we watch twice as many commercials, suffer even more brain-numbness and pay a cable bill of something in the neighborhood of a hundred bucks a month! And if anything, that thought calmed my elevated pulse and told me that, yes, I could return the cable boxes, unplug my TIVOs and march on into a new cable-free tomorrow.
Now, I recognize that I’m not supposed to be the demographic that does this sort of thing. I mean, look at my picture. They say it’s only the younger gens that are snubbing their noses at cable. The median age of broadcast or cable television viewers is 44 years old nowadays (a 6% increase in age from four years ago). And viewers for the major broadcast network shows? Why they clock in at a median age of 53. I’m supposed to be cable’s bread and butter. (Why else would there be so many prime-time commercials for group lawsuits on heart valve replacements? Hey, I never had a heart valve replacement, but they tell me I could be owed some serious money!)
But it was that ever-growing bill that pushed me beyond the breach. I was a no-frills, low-end cable package guy and it was still costing me an arm and a leg. So I’ve sucked it up and joined the literally millions of people yearly who are snipping the cable and surviving on an occasional streamed Netflix movie or Hulu show. (Granted, there’s only a gazillion shows on those two options that I can fill my spare time with versus the three gazillion available with my former cable subscription. And I’ll have to wait a day or two to see the newer stuff … but I’ll have to rough it.)
I will admit that there was one moment in the snippity-snip process that almost caused me to relapse. That was the moment when I was visualizing a sunny daffodil-filled world without cable bills and the letters N, F and L tiptoed their way into my space of harmony.
How many arms or legs would I have to lose to retain that blessed thing called football if cable was gone, I wondered. And then it hit me. There’s this simply, wonderful invention that I can rely upon. This fantastic, obsolete, thingmajig called an “antenna.” It can deliver my football fix directly from the air to my TV. In beautiful HD. And get this … the fix’ll be free.
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