Thanks to a combination of not enough sleep and a conscious effort to stop eating all that sugar, I am in a terrible, cranky, headache-fueled mood. And I'm choosing to take it out on the cable company.
This is a pretty long time coming — the cable company built up a lot of goodwill with me, starting with the day about three years ago when I pushed the wrong button on the remote control and discovered Comedy Central. We had a network-plus-sundries package that cost about $12 a month; the accidentally generous cable company supplied us with basic cable channels for quite a long time without being aware of it. Let me stress that we did not do anything to our cable that gave us these channels, and whereas a person truly on the up and up would have called the company and informed them of the error, the pull of watching Damages and Mad Men was too strong. On the one hand, we were unethical by our inaction; on the other, the cable company is like the great evil of the developed world.
In either case, karma now appears to be setting the record straight: the much more expensive basic cable plus HD package we now pay for in full is substantially worse in terms of signal quality. What I especially like is that the 10% of the time it's screwed up isn't concentrated into a single 2.4-hour period; oh, no, the signal just goes completely crackers every ten minutes or so. The HD feed for the CW (that's a network channel) doesn't come in at all — come fall, when I want Gossip Girl and America's Next Top Model, I will be a very unsatisfied customer watching the standard-definition sister station. (On our great big, beautiful TV. That we will be paying off for the next two and a half years. You can really tell the difference in quality when the screen pixel-scrambles and the sound cuts out.)
I wrote an unhappy e-mail to the cable company complaining about the patchy service and the missing station, and received a very kind reply from someone in customer service. That was pleasant. She remotely reset our feed, which was supposed to resolve the problems. That was also pleasant. The reset made the reception a little better for a while, but restored the missing station not at all. That was...neutral. If the problem persists, I was informed, I would need to schedule a service call. Those cost $25 and require me to miss a day of work. We've veered away from pleasant.
Okay, just now I was watching We Are Marshall. I turned to my roommate and asked, "Why does Matthew McConaughey sound like he's on a loudspeaker? He's on the sidelines; he wouldn't be amplified." We determined that it wasn't a problem with the speakers. Then the closing narration started, and the reverb got worse. Here's a movie I spent two hours of my day watching, and couldn't get to the end because it was unwatchable (and not because of McConaughey, for once — hey-o!).
Of course I'm not going to do anything. The problems we have, a dish will not solve. Instead, like every other person in America, I will seethe and complain. And if you suspect I will watch less TV because of the bad reception, then we have not met.