I can't be the only one who remembers when television ran old movies and syndicated reruns of old shows during the kid-friendly hours of the late afternoon and weekends. Now it's half-a-dozen cookie-cutter "Judge" shows, raunchy "talk" shows with bleeped obscenities and chair throwing, and screaming pitchmen trying to sell us junk for half an hour at a time.
That's before we ever get into the recent habits of the broadcasters themselves, with their near silent shows and blaring commercials, their giant pop-up ads filling the lower third of the screen, their credit rolls acellerated to a blur and squeezed into an illegible corner while the next show begins in another corner.
Don't even get me started on digital broadcast. A little analog "snow" and ghosting was a small price to pay for television that was actually watchable, without the near constant pixellizing, freezing and echoing we get now.
I completely agree on television. Sure we have high definition channels (and I love them...when I can get them), but look at the state of television as it is. It's amazing when you watch a half hour TV show on DVD and realize it's only 21 minutes long, and you blow through 3 whole episodes in an hour. 9 minutes of commercials. That's absurd, and that doesn't include the time they cut out to make room for commercials during the credits, commercials during the opening, commercials in the 30 second banner at the bottom of the screen. It's ridiculous.
While we're at it; radio. Radio was better before. There used to be stations filled with music of every genre up and down the dial, and you couldn't channel without hitting on something worth listening to, even for a moment. Now, I can zip through the dial 5 times in a row, hitting every station, and not get a single song whatsoever. Instead, I get commercial after commercial after commercial, so radio was definitely better before.
Customer service. Before, it was an invested resource, but now it's a dying art. These days, customer service consists of a disaffected, apathetic person standing behind the counter looking at you like you're breathing his or her oxygen. Customer service barely exists because it costs too much money to make sure a customer is satisfied, and it's just much easier to throw cheap replacements at them to shut them up.
That said, customers were better before. There wasn't this sense of "you owe me more because I was slightly inconvenienced". It was understood that you were right to request a replacement if your product failed or didn't meet specific needs, and most of the time, the customer was willing to be more flexible in both time and temperament. Now, most customers try to game the system and walk away with something for nothing.
Sounds like you need a different provider. I never encounter any of these problems.
Which brings up another good point: There was more choice before. Now, your cable provider is most likely the only one available in the area, so if they're terrible, your choice is satellite (if available under the various conditions that come with it), or over the air, which is severely limited. These days, corporations have merged so many times that now it's a handful of megacorporations running the show.
I'll think of more later.
$4.00 U.S. for a bag of two-thirds air and one-third crumbs! "Some settling may have occured during shipment", my ass. How about I hand them $1.50 and say "Some settling may have occured during payment"?
