We had temps in the 60’s with some evening temps in the upper 50’s a week ago.
This past week we were in the upper 30’s with evening temps below freezing. We also got snow mid-week, though only about an inch of a slushy mix here at The Gulch. It will be in mid-teens over the next couple of nights. This has driven me to take care of the last few ‘winterization’ chores here, specifically heavy winter drapes over the slider leading out to the porch and heat shrink over a couple of windows on the north side of the house.
The trusty RAM 1500 will have its ‘winterization’ completed this coming week, between new tires and updated undercoating. (I might have been able to squeeze out another winter with the existing tires, but the tread is a bit thin. The last time the trusty RAM got new tires I had to settle for Light Truck tires because the tires I needed weren’t available. The LT tires have a much harder ride which also caused a loss of almost 4 miles per gallon in fuel economy. The new tires are the correct ones for the truck so I expect I’ll gain back the better ride and fuel economy.)
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One of the other changes taking place here at The Gulch over this upcoming week is a change to a new cable provider.
Our town now has two cable TV companies, with the newer one having just finished installing their cable infrastructure in our part of town. (Call me a cynic, but as I have stated more than once, “Now we have two cable companies to hate!”) The new cable company - who shall remain nameless...but owns NBC - offered a great two-year deal for less than half of what we have been paying our existing provider, with slightly higher Internet speeds.
Our existing provider went from being a pretty darned good cable company to being totally unresponsive to customer needs. This change took place during Covid as they closed local offices and moved their customer/tech support out of state. I know I have been trying to resolve an issue with my Internet service for almost two years now, an issue I know how to fix but takes the actions of the tech support guys on the “other side” of the cable modem to resolve. Do you think I can reach them?
Nope.
There are only two paths for tech support: going to their web page and reading the various FAQs, or invoking the chat function and waiting for 4, 5, 6 hours or more to deal with an actual human being. Their phone number points to the web page and doesn’t connect to an actual human being. My problem cannot be resolved via the FAQs, and I have more important things to do than hang around online for hours on end only to be disconnected and leaving my problem unresolved.
There have been other issues as well, with one of the most annoying being losing the video in the middle of a show for no apparent reason (and finding related channels have also disappeared). It’s been happening with increasing frequency which has certainly peeved the WP Mom to no end.
It’s as if the C-level execs are doing what they can to shed themselves of their holdings up here, pushing towns to dump them as a provider. (If they don’t want to provide services up here any more I would think they would sell their assets to another provider and be done with it rather than letting them just wither away.
All cable companies have franchise agreements with the towns they serve which generally run for 10 years and which are reviewed and then renewed at the end of existing agreement. If a cable company doesn’t meet the terms of the agreement – a contract – the town may decide not to renew the agreement and the cable company has to leave. (This doesn’t happen overnight. Usually the decision not to renew is made a year or two before the agreement expires which allows the town to find a new cable provider.)
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We’ll be off to the youngest WP Sister’s for Thanksgiving, the largest gathering of the WP Clan on Thanksgiving for some time. I’m looking forward to it after the Covid-driven hiatus kept us apart for three years.