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Friday, August 5, 2011

Cutting cable... or the bill at least

Our rented Rogers PVR died a few days ago. None of the hours of recorded shows we had were showing up. I rebooted it and they appeared, but then disappeared soon after. I suspected that the hard drive was dead or dying. It had been acting up for a while in the last couple of months, rebooting on its own for no reason, and splitting recordings in two parts.

Sandra took it to one of their stores to exchange it for a new(er) one. At the same time, she tried to cancel stuff that we don't use because our bill keeps growing. We were disappointed, but not too surprised, to find out that you can't cancel anything at their stores. You have to CALL them to do that. Stupid.

We got the new one hooked up and so far so good.

The next day, Sandra called to cancel the movie package. I turns out that it wouldn't make much of a difference to our bill. Maybe $15 less per month. Sandra told the rep that we need to do something to get the bill down because it's too much.

Get this. The rep offered to keep everything the same but reduce our bill by ~20% in exchange for signing a contract with them for a year.

She also threw in two "on demand" movies, free of charge, for the loss of all our recorded shows.

We accepted the offer.

I had often heard that they'll cut you deals if you call and threaten to leave for another company. We didn't even do that. We just told them that we didn't want to pay as much as we do.

Apparently our monthly bill will now be around $185 instead of $217. It's still too much, imho, but I'm not ready to battle my family for all the channels they like to watch.

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