We cut the cord last week. We bought Roku boxes for each of our TVs, hooked them up and downloaded Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Then we called AT&T, canceled U-verse and dropped the landline, keeping only the internet connection.
It felt a little sad at first. Jackie’s dad and brother-in-law worked for what was first Southern Bell, then BellSouth and finally AT&T. The phone company runs deep in our family. That is the reason we chose AT&T as our provider and resisted cutting the cord for months. The final straw came when we purchased a new Magnavox Smart TV. When I hooked it up there were only two screen resolution options and both were the size of a nineteen inch Philco. I called AT&T and was told that I would have to upgrade my package in order to get the correct resolution. I grudgingly did so and when we paid our bill last month it suddenly was clear that being hooked to the cord was no longer an option.
The young lady I spoke with at AT&T could not have been nicer. She suggested the best and most cost-effective setup for our internet connection and for streaming. She told me how to return our equipment and what the next billing cycle would reflect. Before we hung up I thanked her and truthfully told her that I had nothing but good things to say about AT&T’s customer service. We had a lot of problems setting up the U-verse connection at first. Anytime I called technical support the representative, though maybe a little hard for a Southern boy to understand, was always polite and helpful. If the issue could not be resolved online a service technician would be dispatched and at the house the following day. On one occasion I called early in the morning and a tech was on site that afternoon. But the truth of the matter, I explained, was the fact that by streaming we could get the same channels that we watched over U-verse for a fraction of the cost. She told me that she completely understood. I got the feeling I was certainly neither the first nor the last person to have this conversation with her.
The sad little feeling didn’t last very long. In fact, cutting the cord felt very liberating. Downloading and setting up the apps went off without a hitch. We were able to watch Jeopardy that evening and it looked exactly the same on Hulu as it looked on U-verse.
As I was hooking the Roku devices up and setting up Hulu, my thoughts went back to simpler times when you could purchase a TV, bring it home, plug it in, turn it on and tune in. There were three stations, Channel 2 (WSB), Channel 5 (WAGA) and Channel 11 (WAII) until Channel 17 (WJRJ and later WTCG) and Channel 36 (WATL) came along on UHF. Your house either had a fancy antenna mounted on the roof or a pair that sat on top of the TV. These were called “rabbit ears.”
When my daughter and nephews were younger I told them that when I was their age we only had three channels and most everyone’s TV set was black and white. They stared at me in disbelief. “You mean you didn’t have MTV?” my oldest nephew asked incredulously. “No,” I said, “but Shindig and Hullabaloo came on once a week.”
The Saturday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution contained the Green Sheet. It was the weekly television schedule and was called the Green Sheet because it was printed on green newsprint. It stayed folded up in the magazine rack by our big easy chair and was swapped out every week.
When I was ten years old one of my father’s model airplane buddies bought a color TV. Daddy took me over to his house one night so that I could watch Batman in color. Our next door neighbors bought a color set not long after that. I remember going over to their house to watch the Georgia-Georgia Tech football game and being mesmerized by the fact that the field was green and not gray.
We finally purchased a color TV from Hodges Appliances in East Atlanta about a year later. It was an RCA Victor cabinet model that weighed a ton. It didn’t have a remote so you had to change channels, adjust the volume, the color and the tint by turning the knobs on the front of the cabinet.
The TV set survived several moves, first from Gresham Park to Decatur and then to Rex. My parents gave the set to Mary Jane and I when we rented a house in Tucker. When we moved from Tucker to Ellenwood two years later we left the old TV behind. It was fifteen years old, the picture tube was shot and the color went in and out. The rabbit ears were covered with aluminum foil. People’s faces were distorted on the screen. They all had flat heads, long faces, pointy chins and looked like aliens. The set was just too heavy and too far gone to bother moving. My father was furious. He just couldn’t understand why we left a perfectly good TV behind.
Cutting the cord has almost felt like those days. Maybe it’s because we’re not paying through the nose to a large corporation just to watch a handful of channels. Jackie has climbed right on board, surfing the channels like a binge-watching millennial. Now if we could only find a way to stream the gas, water and electric utilities.