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I moved in January and I decided then that cable TV would be something that I would do without. My roommate didn’t already have it in the apartment, so I decided that I could go without it. Since I could barely get two network channels clearly enough to see what was going on even with an antenna, I have been pretty much without TV since then. I did manage to get caught up on all the shows that I had previously been watching, but I was always behind.

Over time I got used to not having TV. I spent more time on other hobbies. There were times, however, that I couldn’t help but feel out of touch with things that were going on in the world (I like to watch the news) and new TV shows that everybody talked about.

With the start of the new TV season I figured it was a good time to jump back into TV. The DIRECTV guys came by today and installed our service. The guy who seemed to be in charge wasn’t the friendliest person in the world. The second guy who seemed okay, but he installed the dish outside so I didn’t see him much. The third guy didn’t seem to speak much English. The lead guy spoke to him using English and a few Spanish words. I tried to help the lead guy connect the receivers to the TVs since I know how to do it and I know our TVs better than him. He didn’t seem to like that and they handled all but the first TV. I can understand why they would want to be ones to do it. One guy went into my room and shut the door while I was helping the lead guy in the other bedroom. Somehow that made me slightly uncomfortable to have a complete stranger shut up in my room. I’m sure it was all innocent and all he was doing was connecting the receiver. The lead guy kept asking to use our phones to make calls. He made the calls in order to get the service up, but you would think he would have his own phone to use for that. He also asked to use our bathroom. I’m glad there wasn’t any major unpleasantness going on in there.

They had trouble getting the receiver activated at first. A few times the lead guy came back in, looked at the screen, and left without saying a word. At one point after he had been gone for a while, I looked outside and noticed that the truck was gone. I went out back and didn’t see anyone there. I didn’t know for sure if he was coming back or not. He had left his clipboard, so I assumed that he was coming back. When he finally came back he informed us that the guy installing the dish wasn’t doing something correctly and that was what caused the problem. At some point while he was on the phone, he handed me the phone to answer some questions. The lady on the other end tried to get me to sign up for some kind of special promotion, but I quickly stopped her. I signed up for exactly what I wanted when I signed up.

Overall, it wasn’t a whole lot of trouble getting DIRECTV up and going. They didn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary that would have cost me any kind of fee. It’ll be nice to get back into this form of entertainment. It was even fun to see TV commercials again. I enjoyed watching Cheat! and X-Play for the first time in a while and I spent some time watching ESPN (I won’t even comment on that game tonight). I started on my newly purchased Battlestar Galactica DVDs last night. I wonder if I can get caught up before the new season starts.