Kay Hudson

On October 16 I came home to find my cable service was out. A few days later the technician who came to fix it was unable to fight his way through the bamboo to reconnect the cable, which had come loose from the tap (Nature vs. Technology).

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Thanks to a number of domestic distractions (the check engine light in my car, requiring a new set of fuel injectors; the onset of cold weather, requiring not one but two visits from the furnace repairman and several very cold nights) and the difficulty of finding someone willing to cut down the necessary bamboo, the cable remained unattached until December 21.

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I didn’t go entirely without video entertainment over those two months. Several shows I enjoy on CBS were available on line the day after they were broadcast. I discovered the Comcast streaming app, which allowed me to watch most cable shows on my Fire tablet (but not the local or broadcast channels, which require the user to have Comcast Wifi—my Internet and Wifi are provided by my phone company). I made considerable use of Amazon Prime and watched the second season of The Man in the High Castle on my tablet. I did not dip into my fairly extensive DVD collection except to watch a couple of old movies (Breaking the TV Habit).

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So many weeks of no activity on my TV boxes may have triggered something in the Comcast computer system: a week or two into December the streaming app stopped offering me anything but random college athletics, and the web sites for TNT and the History Channel stopped recognizing my Comcast log in.

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That’s when I finally got serious. Through a friend, I found a handyman willing to help me cut the bamboo (amazing how much bamboo landed on the ground in my back yard—twenty or so 55-gallon bags of the stuff have been chopped up and disposed of, and we’re only half done with that). That’s when I found out that the utility pole actually is in my yard; there’s a fence and a large tree blocking it on the other side of my fence, and it serves at least three houses.

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A Comcast technician came out a couple of days later. Between getting his ladder into position, replacing several ancient connectors, and using his tablet to reset all three of my TV sets (why one person needs three TVs is a question for another day), he spent about an hour and a half on my problems, but when he left everything was working as it should.

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That was almost ten days ago, and I find that much of my habit breaking has stuck. I’ve caught up on a couple of shows On Demand, but on the whole I’ve been much more selective about my TV use, reading more, going to bed earlier, listening to the radio more. I’m glad to have the Music Choice Smooth Jazz Channel back—I’m not a person who thrives on silence, I need background noise.

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Other habits have changed as well. I used to do the Houston Chronicle puzzles every evening, apparently while I was ignoring something on TV, because I now have over a month’s worth of puzzle pages piled up on my coffee table. I used to fall asleep watching TV in the bedroom—now I rarely turn that one on.

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Am I thinking of cutting the cord on purpose? Not any time soon. I like the convenience of cable service. I don’t want to have to manage several different sources for the shows I want to see. But I’m definitely keeping my Internet and Wifi with Frontier. I’ll keep those eggs in multiple baskets for the foreseeable future.

They say it takes three weeks to establish a habit, although I suspect that’s a very optimistic estimate. Does it take the same time to break one? Tomorrow it will be three weeks since my Comcast cable detached itself, perhaps with the help of the vegetation shrouding the utility pole and preventing the Comcast tech from reconnecting it.

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I would have been a lot more aggressive about solving this problem if I had ever been convinced to bundle my phone and Internet connections into my Comcast account. Fortunately, those are provided by my phone company, Frontier, and work just fine, along with my Verizon smart phone. With Frontier’s wifi, I have full use of the Amazon Fire tablet I bought a few months ago. It’s not a full-scale tablet for writing and I’m not impressed with the browser, but it’s a great little entertainment machine, which is exactly what I wanted.

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So Cable TV is all I’ve been doing without. That’s not only a first world problem, but folks not far from me are still displaced from their flooded homes, thanks to Hurricane Harvey. I am not complaining.

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I’ve been surprised to discover how quickly I’ve adapted to the lack. (It helps that I’m not a rabid baseball fan and probably wouldn’t have watched any of the recent Astros games anyway, for fear of being a jinx.) I use the TV for background noise at least ninety per cent of the time, running marathons of shows I’ve seen dozens of times or listening to jazz on Music Choice. That’s easily taken care of—I have radios all over the house, including two HD radios that pull in the jazz and classical music stations that Houston seems unable to support over the air (a disgraceful situation in such a large metropolitan area, if you ask me).

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I have discovered that I actually watch very few current shows. I don’t watch reality shows, and over the last year the news has become the worst reality show of all. For what I do want to see, I’ve found alternative methods. CBS.com shows current shows the day after broadcast. (No, Star Trek fan that I am, I haven’t subscribed to their pay service.) The Xfinity Stream app I downloaded to my Fire tablet allows me to watch most cable shows live (I watched the return of Major Crimes on TNT the other night), as well as access to the Music Choice Channels. (Apparently one only gets full service and broadcast channels with an Xfinity home wifi network, but there’s the eggs-in-one-basket thing again.)

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On the Fire or the computer, there’s a lot to enjoy on Amazon Prime: movies, TV, and some very good Amazon-produced shows, and a wide range of music. And then there are the three shelves of DVDs, many of them as yet unwatched, in my living room. This week I’ve rewatched Topkapi and Heavenly Creatures.

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What I have escaped from, I now realize, is the schedule. I’m not planning my evenings by what’s on TV, or when some show starts. I’m not searching for something to “watch” (largely meaning ignore) while I’m getting it all together in the morning. I’m not staying awake at night to watch something I’ve seen a dozen times, just because it’s there. I’m not planning my lunch break to coincide with some show I’ve seen seven times, or hurrying home from something to catch another rerun. The next time my cable box gives me trouble, I’ll probably get one without a DVR.

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Yes, I will get the service reconnected one of these days. I have a new understanding of those who cut the cord with their cable TV providers, but I still like the convenience. But in the meantime I’ve been reading more, getting to sleep earlier, and not watching reruns (well, I have been keeping up with Deep Space Nine on Amazon Prime, but that’s it, honest). I’m going to try to stick with that. We’ll see if three weeks plus is long enough to change a rather mindless habit.