Getting Mad as Hell and Not Taking It Anymore

One weird development (of many, trust me) in this Year of Living Virally is what people are doing with extra time at home.

Yes, you’ve read a lot about people Netflixing but not chillin’. Eating. Taking up a hobby. Eating. Painting a room and ceiling. Eating. Reading War and for the hell of it, Peace. Eating. Getting in touch with one’s “Who’s a Nerd Now?” spirit and riding one’s overpriced Peloton bike. Eating. Baking, and even though it hasn’t gone in the oven yet and there’s egg in the dough, eating.

But I’m talking about getting mad as hell about something that’s disappearing like sand through our fingers: money.

Let’s start with the elephant on your television: cable TV. These clowns pretend to offer savings via “bundles” (as in “bundles” of money into their coffers and out of your wallet), but they take home some $180 a month or, in many cases, more.

And for what? Hundreds of channels, of which you watch, maybe, eight. Oh. And there remain dozens of channels STILL that cost EVEN MORE because you have to pony up more lucre comma filthy if you want to see them.

But the big driver in the piggish profits of cable companies is sports. Pity the non-sports fan paying for cable. All that money to watch a sappy Christmas Hallmark movie in April (recently ruled “cruel and unusual punishment” by the World Court at the Hague).

Major league sports, with their major league player salaries and their major league millionaire / billionaire owner profits cost a lot of money to broadcast. They are Culprit #1 behind bloated prices in the cable industry.

But what about now, with no live sports to speak of being televised and none scheduled for a very long time (unless you want to watch close-ups of Covid-19 viral proteins jousting with the armies of people’s immune systems)? Has cable television responded to the complete absence of sports by lowering your monthly bills?

That would be a “no,” as in big-time “no,” as in “it is to laugh” no.

I remember years back when a landscaping company sent notices to all of its customers saying it was raising prices on lawn-cutting jobs by $10 because of a horrific spike in the cost of gasoline.

Guess what happened months later when the gas prices went back down? You got it. Nothing. Telling us that, in this country, what goes up does *not* necessarily come down.

So, yes. Some of you sheltered-in folks have smartened up, become mad as hell, and called your cable company to tell them they can take their bloated cable box and…

Oh, wait. This is a family blog. Let us draw the curtains of courtesy over the remainder of that line and start streaming stuff on our TVs with something cheaper and a little less greedy and sports-driven.

Moral of the Post: Now that we’ve lost our jobs and the social fabric as we once knew it, it’s high time we think about ways to save ourselves a little money, starting with the most bloated offender in the house, cable television.

Cut the cord, then celebrate your savings by having something to eat.