My Life Without Cable

By Andrew

If you’ve been following our earlier posts, you will have noticed that I decided to cut cable television out of my life upon moving into my new place.  This was not an easy decision as I was a Discovery Channel and Nature Channel fanatic, but my final decision was made based on several factors:

1. Cable TV is fairly expensive if you are living on a budget
2. TVs use a relatively large amount of energy
3. It’s easy to waste away the hours staring at useless programming
4. I have better things to do with my time

The first few days were the most difficult.  I would get home from work, make dinner, settle down to eat on the couch, pick up the remote ready to settle into the latest news in science and then come to the realization that the communication medium that I had grown up with was disconnected.  What the heck was I going to do while I ate?  My roommate wouldn’t be home for a while and my girlfriend is only here a few days a week for dinner.  So I sat there contemplating my next move for the evening while eating.  Lo and behold this, along with reading the news, started to become my dinner routine.

A few months into my TV free existence I was checking the mail while having my dinner and came across the card above.  At first I was intrigued by the wording on the front thinking that it was from a friend that I hadn’t seen in a while, but then upon opening it saw that it was from the cable company.  They didn’t miss me at all; they missed the money that was feeding their bloated cash cow.  To me, a customer retention strategy such as this seems like an exercise in futility.  For most, television is a staple in the home that we all grew up with, and if someone gets rid of it then the pros and cons were probably weighed several times.  Thus a letter from the cable company will likely do little to change my mind and has only made me more determined to avoid purchasing a cable package.  And those hard-spent marketing dollars were wasted yet again when I continued to receive these touching cards.

Three months later and well established into my new routine I began to compare energy bills from months previous; consumption had dropped by a notable amount.  I’ll admit that I was quite pleased with myself.  Not only had I made a lifestyle change that was helping the environment and my wallet, I was becoming healthier and more cultured as a result of the activities I had adopted to fill the time that TV had previously occupied.  So as I settled down for dinner to read the mail, I saw another card from my poor cable provider (it seems they send these out quarterly).  I chuckled to myself at their misguided attempts to lure me back to their subscribership, put the card in the recycling bin, and settled down to finish my dinner.  Upon finishing, I walked over to the living room and started practicing the guitar thinking all the while about what I would do next that evening.  There’s a whole world out there to explore and a lifetime of learning ahead of you.  I have three simple steps to prescribe if you if you want to get started; turn off the TV, get up off your ass, and get outside!