Thursday, January 1, 2009

Time Warner to Stewart/Colbert Fans: Sucks to Be You!

Time Warner Cable decided to give its customers a special New Years treat: cutting off their access to all Viacom channels. Without Dora the Explorer, what will stoned fratboys watch at night? Oh, no worries, Viacom doesn't own Cartoon Network. Aqua Teen Hunger Force to the rescue! Anyway, Nikki Finke has all the details here if you are inclined to read the whole back and forth.

This time last year, this might have upset me. But these days I'm calmer, wiser...and I switched to Comcast in June, so whatever, not my problem. I'm inclined to side with Viacom on this one, though, even with their shitty business practices, because Time Warner is kind of a pain in the ass. When one of my crazy roommates wanted to get cable in her room, instead of letting her get her own account they made me put it under my account (that I had opened a year prior) because of how our building was zoned or whatever - there couldn't be two accounts or something like that. I don't know, they didn't explain it well and after two hours on the phone I finally said screw it and authorized the charge because I had stuff to do and my roommate was whining. And though she was never late with her half because I scared the bejesus out of her - you thought I didn't see you crossing yourself every time I walked past like I was Rosemary's damnassed baby strolling down the hall, and yes, I was also surprised to learn that "Whore of Babylon" doesn't have a direct translation in your language, either that or you wanted me to hear you say it. I'm sorry that American girls wear pants and tops that are not full-on turtlenecks and makeup and jeez! Chill! - it was still annoying.

Also, they would update the software on the cable box, like, every week, and the TV would be unavailable for a few hours in the middle of the night, which was the only time I had to watch TV at that time so that sucked. And the resetting would mess up my Tivo because the cable box would be off post-resetting and I wouldn't notice for a while because the whole point of Tivo is to not have to watch live TV, and that glitch made me miss the final sign off of the WB network that my Tivo was supposed to record, and yes, it was a bunch of programs I'd already seen a million times before but it was the signing off of the network I'd spent most of my formative teen years watching, and I would have been home to watch it but my magazine meeting ran late because my EIC assigned the cover story to a literal crackhead who smokes crack and, big surprise, it came out like it was written by a crackhead and since I was the editor I had to spend the whole night at the office trying to figure out which interview quotes were with real people and which ones were with the voices in my crackhead writer's head! And then rewrite the whole thing so that it no longer looked like it was written by a crackhead! That was awesome!

So yeah, I don't really care who's right and who's wrong in this Time Warner/Viacom imbroglio. All I know is that Time Warner sucks. If you're geographically able to, I highly recommend you switch to Comcast. Their customer service is awesome. (That's the non-sarcastic "awesome" this time - you can tell by the lack of italics.) Last week, I called to drop down to the basic package on account of being unemployed and brokeass, and the guy instead found me a promotion that lets me keep my HBO/Showtime/Starz and pay the basic rate. And if I had a psycho roommate now, I bet Comcast wouldn't make me share an account with her crazy, hatin' ass.

2 comments:

richgoldstein13 said...

Build you own satellite dish and tell these terrestrial motherfuckers what's what.

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smd said...

Well I mean, hell, at this point you can find most shows online free and legal within a day or two of airing. And if you're tech savvy enough, you can route your computer through your TV and watch it all regular like. So there's no reason to put up with the cable company unless you're a masochist, or lazy.