The primary influences on my basic approach to life tended to view society and the systems that make it up as a big puzzle. Every external challenge you face, from how to get the car repaired to paying your bills while maximizing your take-home pay, is an element in a system and every system has rules. In some systems, those rules must be followed to the letter or the penalties are steep but in most systems the rules can be bent, circumvented, or outright ignored largely with no fear of reprisal (some of this is due to lax enforcement on the part of the keepers of a given system but that’s for another time). The chief things you need to realize to get what you want out of a system are that you have to know what your goal is, that you have to figure out what the rules are, and figure out what tools you have to get what you want.
All of this may sound nefarious, like I’m advocating setting up a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme but I’m not. Take, for example, a decision you might have to make about reducing your monthly bills and how much you spend on phone service. The goal is to keep both phone and internet service but to spend less money every month. The rules are that you have to pay for phone service; Internet service…well…if you’re willing to settle for a crappy, insecure connection and your neighbors are dumb enough to have unsecured wireless, and you don’t mind stealing, you may not have to pay for. But let’s look at the tools.
It used to be that your choice was Ma Bell or Ma Bell. Then deregulation happened in the 1980s. Then cell phones and the Internet happened. Now you have choices. If you have a cable modem, for example, and you are happy with your cell phone service and what it costs, you can dump your land line phone altogether. Or, if you’ve got a non-phone company provided Internet connection you can keep your same phone number but get all over calls using the magic of Voice Over IP. In this decision, your primary tool is math because it is a given that you aren’t going to be able to circumvent the rule that says you must pay for phone service so, you use the tools available, alternate providers and your ability to add and subtract, to figure out how to get the most service for the least amount of money.
My cable company of more than 10 years recently made a major change to their channel lineup. Like all cable television providers, they offer tiered subscriptions. With basic service you get all the broadcast channels plus a few others (’cause in this economy more people need access to the Home Shopping Network). With the “signature” tier you get what is commonly referred to as “basic cable” – all the broadcast channels plus things like Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel, TNT, TBS, and on and on. The “premiere” tier gets you everything the two lower tiers get you plus things like Sundance and the National Geographic channel. And, of course, you can at any time add “premium channels,” HBO, Showtime, SkinCinemax, to any subscription. The smart marketing change they made was to mix all of these channels together. It used to be that if you paid for “signature” – the middle tier – you didn’t get any channels numbered over 99. Pretty easy to ignore the things you weren’t paying for. But now to entice you to buy up to the higher priced tier, they’ve mixed them all together so as you’re scrolling through that handy on-screen program guide you’re more likely to see something you might want to watch on a channel you don’t get. Frustrating as all hell sometimes and I resent its transparency as a marketing ploy.
All of this became relevant when I sat down to clear some things I’d recorded off the DVR on very gray, cold Sunday. Lurking there on the DVR’s hard drive were several episodes of a show called Dogtown.
Dogtown is a co-production of the National Geographic Channel and an organization I wholeheartedly support, Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States boasting 30,000+ acres in Utah and dogtown will take in any troubled dog or even dogs that just need to find a home.
This first episode focused for two hours on the rehabilitation of some of the dogs seized from Michael Vick‘s dog fighting operation in central Virginia. Heartbreaking stories about dogs that had never known love or affection, never gotten to play, only train and fight and live in fear. The trainers at dogtown worked with each animal to figure out what he or she needed to become a social, happy, and hopefully adoptable dog (full disclosure: some of the Vick dogs will by court order spend the rest of their lives at Best Friends having been deemed by the court too dangerous to live in a family setting).
But as I discovered that gray Sunday, I only had four episodes of Dogtown which I knew was about to go into its second season. What happened to the others?
Well, at some point we made some reductions in our bills and dropped the tier that includes the National Geographic Channel. But wait, said I to myself, isn’t NatGeo one of the HD channels that is offered free in the tier I do subscribe to? Free HD channels, of course, being one of the features on which cable companies have chosen to pretend they compete.
Lo and behold, yes, I get the National Geographic Channel in HD form right there on my regular 4:3 non-digital, non-flat screen, 15 year-old TV. How, you might inquire? Because that lovely DVR that we rent from the cable company is HD capable. Which means, yes, boys and girls, I’m getting channels for free that I would otherwise be paying an extra $15/month for the privilege of watching. So this DVR that I am renting anyway allows me to circumvent legally the rules of the system that say that I must pay extra to watch certain channels.
Every system has rules. Some rules can be bent, others can be broken. Still others can be ignored altogether. Sometimes the tools you have – the ability to research and read – can get you things you want by allowing you to figure out which rules are which.
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