Last week I needed to pay my cellphone bill* but the internet was down. This crippled me. I never realized how much of my life is online:

Okay, can’t pay bills, maybe I’ll watch a movie. But I can’t download one and I’ve seen all the ones I have. DVD? The player’s not hooked up. Maybe I’ll just surf the… DAMMIT!

Tough life, I know. In the end, Shaw best-practiced me.

I don’t get cable television and I don’t have a land-line phone. They solve problems (“what will I use my TV for?”, “how can people talk to me?”) that I don’t have. A rep. from Shaw called me a few days ago and asked me if I was happy with their service. I mentioned the outage and they offered me a free month of cable TV in recompense. I accepted.

Think about that for a second: they turned a service failure into a sales call and hooked me up (at the cost of a 15 minute site visit) for one of their other services. Brilliant.

I’ve now been TV’d for 45 minutes. The low channels mid-day are all soaps, talk, and cooking shows, the domain of the 50s housewife. Flip. On CMT a cowboy is teaching a woman to fire a shotgun. “Now, missy, why is it you want to shoot skeet? Flip. “You can see that these guys really understand the dirt” over the noise of engines roaring — a competitive televised tractor pull. Flip. “Mr. Tuvok…” Flip. “Trip, can you tell me if the Xindi…” Flip. “A school shooting in Toronto has left one fourteen year old dead today…” Flip.

I’m used to TV sans-commercials and in huge chunks. I just watched the first season of Veronica Mars (and Life on Mars and Afro Samurai) this week. I’ve read that traditional TV is best for live stuff like news and sports and things that are time-dependent like The Daily Show.

My experiment will be whether the shlock content of the tube screws up the signal:noise. We’ll see. So far not even The National has been that interesting.

* The cost of texts is getting out of control. I need an unlimited plan of some sort.