Curse you, Comcast
I spit at thee, foul Comcast!
About six months ago ATT Broadband (which since got bought out by Comcast) abruptly pulled Cartoon Network from our cable system. We'd started getting it the day we upgraded to a digital box, and had enjoyed it for about a year, I think. The ignominy was compounded when that particular station got replaced with, of all things, a 24-hour-a-day shopping network.
When I asked the cable company why they pulled Cartoon Network off the box, they said that we shouldn't have gotten it to begin with. It wasn't part of the programming package my town agreed to when they signed their contract with ATT or MediaOne or Whoever-the-Hell-It-Was at the time, and it was just a pure administrative accident that everyone in town should have gotten it when digital cable came to town years later.
Of course, these cable providers aren't, for the most part, clueful or technologically advanced enough to be able to offer a la carte service and let their customers pick and choose what stations they'd like to get. Even though these digital cable boxes have plenty of computing power to handle such a task, and presumably the cable companies do too, since they can clearly turn these stations on and off at whim as well. So my begging, pleading and cajoling fell on deaf ears, and we've suffered without it since then. No Toonami. No Adult Swim. No Dexter's Laboratory, no Samurai Jack. The sun grew a little dimmer the day Cartoon Network left my world.
Well, since then, we've looked at replacing the cable box with a dish. That's a no-go, because the neighbor's trees block the line of sight to the DirecTV satellite. There don't seem to be any other options that I can readily consider.
So, when I got a letter yesterday announcing that Comcast was shuffling the stations around on my box soon, presumably to take away service that I've been paying for but haven't really deserved ... AGAIN ... I hoped that maybe plans were afoot to add Cartoon Network back to the lineup. So I sent their customer service department an e-mail with my query. The response just came back a bit ago:
"Thank you for your inquiry regarding delivering Cartoon Network in Mashpee. At present, Comcast has no immediate plans to re-launch this channel in your town. We do our best to deliver a channel lineup of quality networks and services to our communities. I have forwarded your inquiry to our Marketing, Programming and Managerial Teams so they are made aware of your request."
Make sure that you forward them my boot so they can be made aware of my desire to plant it up their asses, too. Bureaucrats! Nazis! Fiends! So much for being a different cable company. The only thing that's changed is who I make the check out to.