that hour we spent talking to dish network

Jack and I just spent the last hour on the phone with Dish Network.

Waste of time?  I don't know.

What are you supposed to do when your local NBC affiliate suddenly goes off the air because it can't reach an agreement with your tv provider so you realize you aren't going to get to watch the last week of football before the playoffs.  And if it goes anything like the last time this happened when Fox 13 couldn't come to terms with Dish and went off the air for weeks and only just resolved it all barely in time for the start of the football season--well, it seems likely we won't see the playoffs (playoffs!) or the super bowl and, well, it was concerning.

And since Jack had surgery on his thumb this afternoon and was a little medicated, it seemed like as good a time as any to tell Dish we either wanted our local NBC affiliate back or we wanted out of our contract.  And of course, they insisted they were working on the affiliate issue 24/7--seriously? 24/7?--and there wasn't any way they could waive the early termination fee, which, wait, there's nobody at Dish who can waive the fee and let us out of the contract?  Well then we need to talk to your supervisor.  So that was the story, one supervisor after another until we were talking to the secretary to the president of Dish.  Seriously?  And they all had the same script.  Which is, I'm just gonna say, really frustrating.

Pretty early on in the call, Jack realized Dish wasn't going to let him out and he didn't really want to change providers because we like those Dish hoppers. 

After an hour it was time for another pain pill for Jack.  And by then, the secretary to the president had set us up for half price HBO and Showtime and a $20 discount for some number of months that added up to more than the early termination fee. 

So we're still with Dish.  Paying $35 less per month for some amount of time.  And according to Jack's surgeon, in three months he'll be so glad he had the surgery.