Time for a quick update on things and thoughts.
So I made an appointment with my regular doctor to get my PSA test retaken, but it won’t be for a few weeks. Plus – on that week I’ll have a dentist appointment one day and the lab visit & a trip to the dermatologist on the next day – so lots of doctorish activity all at one time – which is my favorite. On the bright side, we leave for a long weekend in the mountains the next day – so something to look forward to!
A had this long two day fight with Cox Cable earlier this week. My 2 year agreement with them ended recently, so as you would expect – our bill skyrocketed. That’s exactly how you treat longtime customers, right? Well, I got on the phone with a “retention specialist” who, after intense negotiations, got our bill down to a reasonable level – even cheaper than we’ve been paying the past 2 years. The catch is this is only for the first year of a two year agreement – and then it goes up a little higher than what it was just a month ago. I got mad and threatened to go to a competitor and all I got was a bunch of statements about how the competitors don’t have as good of a product and they are just pushing a sales pitch and they won’t really carry through with was they are promising. Blah, blah, blah. He even asked me if I wanted to go ahead and have him turn off our service. I was shocked and told him – not until I have another option set up! Well, I hung up without renewing and was pretty ticked off. I had been doing research on the competition and wasn’t sure what to do. They advertised decent pricing to get new customers, but make it so hard to compare channels and equipment and what the cost will be after taxes and fees. For a while I was leaning toward Verizon Fios, but I’d have to buy a new router that works with their equipment – my apple airport extreme would be useless – and there were a bunch of bad horror stories online. Looking at Direct TV – it would be hard to get the same channels at a decent cost. I’d have to upgrade to a whole bunch of new channels in order to get the few sports channels that ODU plays on a couple times a year and the channel the Orioles play on – for when the Red Sox play them and MLB.tv is blacked out. Plus there is having to have a dish on our roof and the possibility of losing signal during bad weather. So – I reluctantly agreed that Cox had the best deal for me and would allow me to not have to change anything. The problem is really with all of them. There needs to be a better system – and when it happens – all the cable, dish, fios companies are going to collapse because of the rush to switch. Tv and internet needs to be cheaper and there needs to be the system that has been talked about for a while but noone has figured out how to create yet. To be able to choose your channels and apps, have them all tie together in an operating system, allow dvr functions and/or on demand functions – and have it cost $50-$75 per month. A system where you can get live tv, sports, hbo, fx, amc, netflix, hulu – all tied together with a common interface and dvr system – in the cloud. Apple tv comes the closest right now, but there is no grid, no dvr, no live tv without already having cable. One day… Anyway, the next day I called Cox back and agreed to a another 2 year deal. The guy I talked to this time was real nice and polite. I also decided to switch to the new 6 record system for no added cost – which is going to be a godsend. Right now we can only record 2 shows at a time. We don’t need to record more than 2 shows at a time all that much, but what usually happens is we are watching something and then 2 shows are getting ready to record and the system makes us turn off what we are watching so the 2 shows can record. Irritating. Now we won’t have to do that – and the new dvr will be 2 terabytes and have voice control and a bunch of other new bells and whistles. The problem now is that we are going to lose what we have on our current dvr – and they are coming next week to install the new system. So we need to watch everything important by then and take note of some other things we need to go to an app in order to catch up later. After finishing with renewing and ordering new stuff, the Cox guy transferred me to the internet tech people – because we’ve been having service drop off issues lately. Sometimes I need to restart our modem 2-3 time a day to get the internet back online. The lady that helped me was really nice and helpful. I think she was out in the mid west somewhere because she had a slight Fargo accent – which was cool. Anyway, she told me about a problem they have been having lately with Apple routers – about how the routers are set up to work with IPv6 connectivity but Cox is only using IPv4 and this has been causing connection and internet problems. She guided me through turning off the IPv6 on my router and now I’m waiting to see if that solved the problem. Since the change we haven’t lost the internet once, so it might have worked. Anyway – she was really nice, she thank me for my many years of being a customer and told me I sounded too young to have been with them so long. I didn’t mention how close I had just come to switching…
So, in a previous post I talked about how busy the month May is for us – and that has certainly been the case so far. Tomorrow is the annual Greek Festival we like to go to, so that will be fun. Next week is mine and my wife’s 20th wedding anniversary and we are going to take off work and hang out together to celebrate. I think I’m going to do a post about our wedding day and our crazy cool trip to Paris for our honeymoon in the next few days. Then at the end of the month we are taking the Friday before Memorial Day off and heading to the mountains to get away. Lots of hiking and wineries and eating and watching sunsets and animals are planned. Hopefully the weather will cooperate – it’s been so rainy all spring so far.
Getting back to the health issues. My family doctor gave the name of a new urologist I can try. I haven’t called yet to make an appointment. There are other choices too, and like everything else, it’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is. When you go online there is no real and useful way to find a doctor. You can find some reviews, but it is so underwhelming. This is another area that needs big time reform. We are all spending so much money in order to provide health care for all when most of the people who don’t have health care make a conscious decision not to get it for what ever reason. This whole Obama Care system has increased the cost of everything and made the insurance companies even less willing to approve procedures. What it hasn’t done is made the system more efficient and transparent or made health care better – as far as I see it. My personal insurance premiums have skyrocketed in cost and I’ve had tacked on a bunch of new deductibles and copays that weren’t there a few years ago. There is still no way to easily know the cost of a procedure and what the copay cost will be. I’ve tried to find out and it’s like pulling teeth while trying to get a bill through congress. There is still no accountability for doctors and hospitals to be able to judge how good they are – and there is no way to shop for the best care. But people who would like to make a choice – in these “free” United States of America – to not have health insurance are forced to get it by law and the rest of us have to subsidize it. It’s a pretty messed up system…
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