Sacrificial Virgin

There’s nothing like a tight sexy box, I always say, and after much umming and ahing the wife and I have finally acquired one for the use of the entire family.

Having been a cable TV subscriber for the best part of 10 years I was, I admit, reticent about the benefits of a set-top box but finally the law of economics won out. We need to make some savings and paying out for a huge cable TV package that features hundreds of TV channels we don’t actually watch seemed idiotic. My quality of life is not going to suffer for being without Bid-Up TV, Price War TV, Television X and Hot Grannies From Grimsby. That last one is made up by the way. Though I do, I admit, wince at losing all the history channels – my wife knows I am rather partial to an odd evening of “Hitler P0rn” as she calls it.

The set-top box we’ve gone for accesses all the channels we watch regularly and features a hard drive that can record 2 programmes simultaneously or record one programme while you are watching another. For someone who was still operating a front loading VCR last week that is technological progress indeed. Of course it now means the wife and I are experiencing recording lust and have already recorded a whole heap of programmes that normally we’d have been happy to let pass us by in the vain belief that we will one day find the time to watch them. There’s already 2 episodes of The Rob Brydon Show on the hard drive that we still haven’t decided to watch. Not sure whether this is good taste or bad taste.

Anyway, now that we’ve got a new, smooth, glamorously tactile box (alas, no Brazilian) we no longer need to retain the scabby, saggy box that Virgin Media supplied us with many moons ago (and that now smells of wee). So I rang Richard Branson to inform him of this and one of his customer facing minions at first accepted my decision to ditch their TV package but then inevitably went into hard sell mode pointing out that the TV package I currently subscribe to means I get an £18 reduction on my Virgin Media phone bill (eh? First I’d heard of it!) and that if I wanted to just reduce my TV package to the “small size” I could retain a £5 reduction on my phone bill.

But I don’t need the cable TV service at all, I pointed out. I’ve disconnected it. I very patiently explained this to him twice before – sounding personally insulted and aggrieved – he finally agreed to acquiesce to my wishes though he truculently pointed out that when I made telephone calls from my Virgin Media phone line in future they will now increase the amount of my monthly bill by the cost of the call.

Really? Is that how it works? I never knew.

So now I have to ring a different number to book in the disposal engineer (my name for him) because, or course, the guy I spoke to can do everything but that for me apparently though hopefully the call won’t cost me money which will go onto my monthly phone bill. Heaven forbid.

So our old box’s days are numbered. I do, I admit, feel slightly dishonorable. Like I am betraying an old friend. Casting her out into the cold or if not into the cold then at least into the caverns of a vast Virgin warehouse full of old chapped boxes that nobody wants to finger anymore or indeed ever. I am plainly a heartless cad.

But all is not lost. Perusing the instruction manual that came with our new non-virgin box, it seems our new purring playmate can get the Yesterday channel. I can access Hitler p0rn after all!

Cool.

Well in that case: Virgin smirgin. Auf wiedersehen pet and guten tag Adolf!