The dinosaur waddled up to the corner retail establishment, slowed by what he was carrying.
They were ancient black boxes — four of them — along with the remote controls that, allegedly, operated them. With his tiny, T-Rex like arms, he struggled to hold the boxes as they balanced on his protruding mid-section.
A worker from the store, wearing a logoed fleece vest on a 90-degree day, took pity on him and opened the door to help before the boxes could fall to the ground and crash into rubble.
That’s really what they were already — rubble from another era.
I was the dinosaur, walking to the store to return cable boxes, two of which hadn’t been used in years. Yes, I was cutting the cord.
The move had been in the works for years. I would talk about it occasionally with my older children, or my younger co-workers. Roku or Fubo, Tubi or Hulu? Why are they all four-letter words? How will I get local channels? Is there a TV Guide?
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On my recent vacation, I finally made the plunge. It was a conversation with my father that pushed me over the edge. He’s 81.
We were sitting in his living room not watching the MLB All-Star Game. Dad still has cable. The cable company is having a dispute with one of the networks. We turned to the All-Star game and got a message from the cable company blaming the network for practicing capitalism. I missed seeing Elias Diaz of my beloved but awful Colorado Rockies . I watched the highlight later on Twitter, er, X. Or maybe it was Threads.
I know what you’re thinking: Rockies? But you live in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. I blame Bill McClellan, my predecessor in this job. Like Bill, I love a baseball team from my hometown that for most of its history has been hapless. Hey, at least I don’t like the Cubs.
After we missed out on the All-Star Game, my dad went on a rant about technology. He’s still mad that we made him get rid of his flip phone a few years ago. “Why do I need to text?†he asked.
Feeling a little too much like the old man with a flip phone, I made a decision. When we got home, cable was going the way of the dinosaurs.
We had already added one streaming service after another over the past few years — to watch soccer, or Yellowstone, or HBO, er, MAX — and it made no sense to keep paying for cable to give me a bunch of channels I didn’t want when I was already paying other services for a bunch of channels I don’t need.
But there was a certain guilt involved that I struggled to overcome. Like my cable company brethren, I work at a buggy whip factory. Yes, I’m stealing that comparison from McClellan, too. He’s very sharing that way.
You remember buggy whips, right? They were used by drivers of horse-drawn carriages, which mostly went away after cars were invented. There were also street cars and trolleys. Remember them?
Alas, we’re sentimental here in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. We try to bring the horse-drawn carriages back downtown until we realize it’s not particularly good for the horses, and we try to bring the trolleys back on Delmar Boulevard until we realize that’s not a good idea either. But we do it anyway because, well, just because.
Newspapers, as you might have noticed, are not what they used to be. Oh, we still punch above our weight most days, but we’re smaller than we used to be, in pages and staff. First we lost the classifieds to the internet, then we tried to catch up by giving away our work on the internet. Then we tried charging for it, and now we’re stuck in this loop where we give a little of it away and charge for the rest. And like the cable company’s TV offerings, we’re doing everything we can to avoid going the way of the buggy whip factory.
The cable company tried to save me. They slashed my costs to some ridiculous number, but I held firm.
By the end of vacation, I had become a full-fledged cord-cutter. The televisions were set up and easy to use. All the apps were there and nobody had to constantly sign in when they decided to stream. The new remote control has only six buttons, compared to more than 20 on the other one.
I settled down in my easy chair to watch the Cardinals game. They were playing Bill’s Cubs.
Oops. Turns out the team’s network provider doesn’t play nicely with my streaming services. Despite having two obsolete satellite dishes on my roof, and probably 100 yards of coaxial cable running through my house, I can’t watch a local baseball game because two companies are having a fight over new technology, just like they were having at my dad’s house, the one with the cable.
I’d text him to seek solace, but he hasn’t figured out how to use his phone.
Life was easier in the buggy whip era.