MacGougan at Large

Notes on My Transition to Retirement - 6

Getting Rewired

One of the first home-related projects I took on as a retired person was to switch our internet/TV/landline-phone service provider. You may not be able to relate to this, but our household had been in a dysfunctional, long-term relationship with an unresponsive and overpriced coaxial cable company. My goal was to make the leap to a slightly less unresponsive and slightly less overpriced fiber optic company. 

As I write this, I’ve been working on this project for three months and have almost succeeded. If you’re wondering why this message looks so bright and shiny, it’s because I posted it through a fiber optic cable. 

I say “almost succeeded” because there are still a few loose ends. They can’t get the voicemail for our land line to work. Our house is still connected to a temporary, above-ground wire, even though there’s now a buried wire in place ready to be connected. (The line-burying crew arrived half an hour after the installation team left.) These details are being handled with the speed and efficiency I associate with our old cable provider.

Still, it’s nice to be untethered from our old provider. My last interaction was to schlep a grocery bag full of old equipment to their local store. The key items were a modem and TV box. The company was going to charge us a lost equipment fee if we didn’t return these items to them. This seemed a bit greedy to me, since we’d paid the company an itemized fee for the use of each of these items each month for many years. Clearly these items had been more than paid off already. The TV box no longer even worked properly. It was,in fact, the company’s lack of interest in solving that problem that had precipitated our change of service providers. 

The young man who recorded the return of the equipment was very friendly and efficient. He said, “In a few days, you’re going to get a text asking about this transaction. Just to be clear: that’s a rating about me. It’s not a rating for how you feel about our company overall.” I felt his pain. It’s got to be tough getting good scores from people who already hate your company enough to cancel its service and - as a going-away present - have been coerced into a pointless errand.