Siriusly Paying for Radio

As is the case with many of my stories, I have to go back a few decades to provide some background.

I am a middle aged mensch, born about a week before Thanksgiving back in 1970.  Thus, I grew up with many things that my grandparents and parents did not, but without a lot of things that Millennials and the following generation of those my children’s ages did.

For instance, when I was a ten year old in 1980, my family still used a rotary phone.  We were late to the microwave game and did not have one of those yet.  We did not get a PC until almost every other family had one quite a few years later than 1980, more like in the late nineties after I had already become an adult and moved out.  And we did not have cable TV and would not for about another ten years.

Funny story about how my family finally got cable TV.  I am about six-and-a-half years older than my brother, with a sister in between us whose lovely house my son and I just stayed at for a great week in NOLA.

My brother has been a shrewd guy since the time he was a little kid trading baseball cards and always coming out ahead.  Same goes today for the cases that he litigates in State and Federal court in two states.  If you come up against him, your best bet is to settle the case as quickly and quietly as you can.

Anyway, when I set off for college in 1988, my family still did not have cable TV.  My siblings and I grew up with a fairly strict one hour rule when it came to watching TV, although I concede that it slowly expanded to two hours and then three by the time my brother was in high school.  As my mother has explained to me more than once, my sister and I wore our parents out sufficiently that they did not have the energy or desire to crack down on their youngest child on TV or much else for that matter.

So what a surprise it was to me coming home for some type of break during my sophomore year of college, when my brother must have been a high school freshman, and we had cable at home.

Now I had been enjoying cable TV at the UW for the past year-and-a-half at my dormitories, watching movies with other freshman and sophomore boys on campus in the dorm lounges.  We could even get it in our dorm rooms for a few bucks per month, maybe five bucks for each of us.

But what a surprise to have it at home.

When I asked who finally caved, my mother explained with a chuckle that my younger brother had ordered it, himself.  Our father must have been working and my mother was out, too, one day when she returned home to find a cable TV installer in our home.  When she asked who ordered it, the installer told them that their son, my younger brother, did.  He signed the papers and everything.

Of course, my brother’s savings at the time could not sustain a monthly cable TV bill, but I will report here that my mother still has cable TV at her home nearly six years since her husband, my father, passed away and nearly three decades after my younger brother ordered it.  These days, my brother does very well for himself and his family financially.  He could pay for a hundred years of cable and barely miss the funds.

Once on my own and in an apartment, my wife of nearly twenty-two years who was my fiancé when we moved in together, ordered cable TV for our apartment in Rogers Park.

I was a P.O. at the time, as detailed in my eBook by the same name.  Now, I had more than one cable TV installer on my caseload at the time, so I was well aware of their low pay and the side deals that they would be amenable to cutting.  A few words here and there could gain you premium cable channels that I do not even have today.

For those of you who have never heard of this, let me be the first to tell you it is called “The Cable Man Special.” 

As I was chatting with the installer at our first apartment, I asked him out of my fiancé’s earshot if there were any special deals going on for movie channels like HBO or Showtime.  Probably making little more than minimum wage at the time, the installer quickly caught my drift and said that he could add those two channels, plus a few more that I have long forgotten, without adding it onto my monthly bill.  His words were something along the lines of, “yeah, we’re offering them for free for the first two months but I’ll write it up so you don't get charged for them after the intro's done.”

I had about sixty dollars in cash in my pockets at this time, and quickly considered giving it all to him or if I could keep a twenty for myself.  I know that giving him a twenty in the early nineties for HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and other channels was too cheap.  I was not yet a mensch, but working towards my menschdom at the time.  One of my buddies had suggested tipping the guy forty or fifty if he helped me out.

Now you may frown upon this minor economic transaction completed in front of a ratty apartment building on Lunt Avenue in West Rogers Park twenty-four years ago, but what I did was hand the guy two of my three twenties and told him to have a nice dinner out on me.

My fiancé and I enjoyed the premium movie channels that year.

We moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom apartment in the same apartment complex the next year, which wound up being a huge mistake despite the additional space.  Even though we had many great times in that apartment and were even married in June of that year, the intense nightly drama and noise in both the apartments below and above us made it a place that both of us could not wait to get out of.  The roach infestation that was not present in the one bedroom unit also made it suck.

We moved to a much bigger apartment our third year of living together, albeit in a ghetto neighborhood east of Ridge Avenue in East Rogers Park.  It was at that apartment that I witnessed the only two shootings that I have witnessed to date, one of the drive-by variety right on our corner and the other a run-by that woke me up to the view of two Hispanic teens running down the street in a crouch with assault rifles after shooting up a building about four doors down from ours.

I also witnessed more drug dealing on the corner where we lived than you could imagine.  Like many people today, I feared retaliation  thus did not call the cops.  But I did inform one of my friends who was with the twenty-fourth precinct at the time, and he did report it to his desk sergeant and had some patrol officers keep an eye on things every now and then.  The corner is probably much the same today: the intersection of Wolcott and Estes, just a block west of Clark Street.

During the drive-by shooting late on a Saturday night, my wife and I were in the living room at the corner of the house that we were renting in, watching cable TV.

After three years of renting crappy apartments in Rogers Park, my wife and I became “homeowners,” “purchasing” a condominium unit in Evanston around her birthday and just a few months after she informed me that she was expecting our now nearly twenty-year-old son.  I was twenty-seven years old at the time and working my way through graduate school after work.

I knew that I could not have a wife and baby at home where there was a fairly decent chance that a stray bullet would come flying through our window.  Also, all my twenty-something P.O. buddies were purchasing condos or houses at that time, now that they had so-called “real jobs.”  One more strike against that block was that I personally had two people on my caseload at the time, one of whom had more than one prior murder conviction.  I never did see them around the neighborhood, but took little comfort knowing that these two scumbags lived on the same block that we did.  I was frightened of running into them while walking down the block and the problems that could cause.  I’m certain there were other criminals on the block, but I did not know who they were.

It did not feel like I was doing anything extraordinary having a son and purchasing a condo at the age of twenty-seven.  If anything, I felt a few years behind the game, since one of my good friends at the time had had a son the previous year and my best friend in the Probation Department (portrayed as Officer Scalzo in the P.O.) had purchased a house in a nice part of the City two years earlier.

Funny story about our cable at our condo.

My wife and I plugged in our Sony Trinitron tube TV, the same one that is still in our bedroom, and were pleased to find that there was already cable on it.

Without asking anyone or reading anything about it, we figured that it was included in our $200 or so monthly association fee.  We did not remember hearing about it during any of the paperwork, but were pleased to know that it included cable.

Well, we enjoyed cable including me watching late night Cubs games on the west coast with our son sleeping on my chest while my wife got some much-needed sleep.  I often fell asleep, myself, watching whatever was on cable those many late nights.

Let me tell you, we had quite a few unpleasant things about our condo unit including, but not limited to, being above all of the garages for the larger units, people hanging out late at night in our building’s parking area making a racket and an infestation of mice that made me wonder if all the mice in Evanston ran through our condo unit.  Because the infestation had not yet reached the bigger, more expensive units in the upper floors, the association basically said that the problem was ours and ours alone.

One day, we turned on our TV to find no cable.  No matter how many times I tried, the cable was gone.  I casually asked some neighbor friends of ours if cable was included in the association fee.  

They explained that it was not and that the building’s cable provider had discovered that a few units had been sponging off of the cable feeds of other units, but had put an end to it.

I did not admit that our unit had been one of those, although I certainly never had the know-how of how to splice cable from our neighbor’s unit to ours.

We paid for cable the last half of the three years that we resided in that condo before I decided that I could not subject my wife and son to one more night in a mouse-infested apartment with many more problems.  Never mind the ownership aspect of condominium living; what we lived in was an old, run-down apartment on a noisy street.

We set out to do what so many before us have and what so many more will do.  We searched for a house that we could afford in a “nice” town with a “good” school district and a yard.

After viewing about thirty houses in about five different northwest suburbs over three consecutive Sundays, we finally looked at the house where I am writing this nearly seventeen years later.  For those of you younger than I, the housing market in the Chicago suburbs in fall 2001 was f-ing nuts.

Our agent would call us at home at 9:00 PM on a Friday or Saturday night about a new listing just posted.  We would meet her there at 9:00 AM the next morning an hour west from our apartment.  

My wife and I would quickly consult and then submit an offer right around the asking price.  We had told her that our upper limit was $200,000, so of course all of the houses that we looked at were listed for $205,000, $210,000 or a bit higher.

Twice we were outbid within minutes of submitting our bid and, both times, we were not able to match the offers being submitted.

It was not high-priced real estate that we were pursuing, but we still felt that we could not match the financial strength of those who we were competing against for those decent houses in “nice” towns with “good” school districts and nice backyards.  For a price just around 200 K.  

Eventually, we submitted a bid that was accepted for the home where I am writing this post.

It was not as if we purchased our dream home, but it did tick off the criteria of being in a so-called “good” town.  The school district is actually very good, perhaps even great, and is often listed among the best districts in the State.  Both of our children attended a magnet school in the district with a curious mixture of the highest-achieving kids in our district and those who could not “fit in” at the other schools for whatever reason. 

Our home has a good-sized front yard and back yard combining to over 10,000 square feet of grass for our almost one-third acre lot.  Mostly, it is a gigantic pain in the ass to mow.  But it makes me happy when anyone in our family can enjoy some leisure time in our back yard.  My little baby, our Morkie, loves the yard and protects it fiercely should you happen to walk by.

But this is not about our yard.  It is about cable.

We moved into our home on Labor Day just days before 9/11.

As a matter of fact, my wife did not know about 9/11 for a few hours after it happened due to our lack of TV and not listening to radio.  Smartphones did not really exist back then, nor did the social media feeds where she gets most of her news now.

We did own the old Triniton that I still use occasionally now and an even smaller TV, but we did not yet have either of them plugged in or an antenna to catch the TV waves out of the air.

We actually went for more than five years without cable TV, relying on the dog ears purchased at Radio Shack to capture grainy pictures of the local networks that broadcast throughout my childhood: CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN, Fox, WFLD and a bunch of high-numbered stations, some of them in Spanish.

What finally got me to dial up Comcast was Da Bears making the Super Bowl in February of 2007.  I did not want to go to a bar to watch it and we were not invited to any Super Bowl parties.  I just wanted to be able to watch it in my own basement on my own TV while drinking beer that I purchased myself.

Another quick funny story to insert here.  After Bad Rex threw an interception that Kelvin Hayden returned for a touchdown, sealing the Colts' victory, I turned the TV off and went into our laundry room for something to find that our hot water heater had burst and left water all over the floor.  

Realizing that the heater was twenty-one years old at the time, ironically dated January of 1986, the month of the Bears Super Bowl victory during my freshman year of high school, we scrambled to sop up the water and my wife had Lowe’s out to our house the next day installing the heater that heats our water today.  

What I failed to mention was that for several years prior to ordering cable for the Bears’ Super Bowl flop of 2007, I had told my wife that I never want to pay for TV again. 

Quite a few years later, we began renting cars for our family trips.  This is perhaps the last decade-and-a-half, since we became the parents of two and I often drove cars that were very unsafe for long-distance family travel.

We first began enjoying Sirius satellite radio on a few of these car rentals including twice while vacationing in Da U.P. and another time for a week-long trip to Arizona via Las Vegas.

On both trips, my daughter and wife spoke of how cool it was using the satellite radio where we could listen to whatever type of music we want to without commercial after commercial.

I agreed that it was pretty cool, but what type of fool would pay for radio when there are hundreds of free stations being beamed through the airwaves?

It is most decidedly a very unfrugal thing to do.

One thing that I was and remain frugal about is driving our vehicles until they can no longer drive.

One short year ago, I struggled keeping two junky vehicles on the road and would often alternate between them depending on factors including the weather, where I was driving to and if I had to pick up or transport somebody or something.

One vehicle was a 2006 Nissan Maxima, twentieth year edition, that I purchased used in August of 2010 with about 65,000 miles on it for $6,000.  It was a complete lemon by the end of my first year driving it, and I probably plowed at least another $6,000 into it over the seven years that I owned it prior to donating it to the American Cancer Society last July.  I never even got it to 100,000 miles so, if you do the math, I spent over $10,000 to drive a car about thirty thousand miles with it in the shop or undriveable much of the time.  

The final time of many that I had my Nissan towed.

My son broke the CD player on it relatively early on in my owning it, though he would dispute breaking it and cannot defend himself in this post.  But break it he did.  Thus, I was stuck with only radio on it for the last three or so years that I owned it.  I rarely drove it during that last year of owning it, as every time I did, something broke or fell apart and I was freakin’ sick of paying to keep that junker on the road.  It spent at least six months without being driven before my wife had had enough and demanded that we rid ourselves of an inoperable vehicle.  

After all, we’re not hillbillies.

The second vehicle was one that I loved, a 1998 Subaru Legacy that my parents purchased right around the time of our son’s birth.  They drove the car for many years, and my mother gave it to us a year or so after my father’s death in 2012.  Like my Nissan, it had not been driven for a while although much longer.  If you know how harsh Chicago winters are, it can do a Hell of a lot of damage to a seventeen-year-old vehicle left in a mechanic’s driveway without being driven for a winter.

Like the Nissan, I plowed plenty of money into keeping this junker on the road and it became my primary commuting vehicle to my place of work.  I suffered my fair share of ridicule from co-workers, business owners who sighted me driving it and even random people in the lane next to me.  I had teen-agers point and laugh at the car, all the while I am thinking that I must save two hundred grand to help put my children through college.

I must admit that the thought went through my head many a time that I hope those ridiculing my car would have to borrow a hundred grand or more to pursue a degree, while I help put my children through undergraduate without borrowing much if anything at all.

Regarding what I listened to in that Subaru, it did not even have a CD player to break.  It came with a radio and a cassette player that was so busted out that I never even attempted putting one of my few remaining tapes into it.  I don’t think that the cassette would not have made it out, I know it.

I’m getting to the Sirius part.

First I rid myself of the inoperable Nissan and then spent the next few months nursing the old Subaru along in the hopes of it making it to this year, 2018, when I would finally be ready to let it go after having served my parents and me well for two decades.

Alas and alack, the Subaru died an inglorious death on Small Business Saturday, the day following Black Friday, last November.

My little sweet baby (my Morkie) was riding shotgun and we were heading toward a small lake with a walking path a few miles from our house.  I was in a great mood at the time, having enjoyed a fantastic Thanksgiving gathering and feast with those whom I hold most dear.  I still had a few days off and the weather was decent.

The sound of the engine giving out was so loud that you could have heard it several blocks away.  It scared my baby, and it scared me too.  Luckily, the engine blew out just about three blocks from our house, so we drove back with the loud rattle and smoke billowing out from the front.

Somehow, after dropping my baby off at home and explaining to my wife that I think the Subaru finally bit the big one, I drove it to a local mechanic a few miles from our home.  I had the emergency light blinking, smoke billowing out and a rattling sound that could be heard anywhere within the neighborhood.

I’m not a car guy by any stretch of the imagination, so if you want a complete diagnosis you are reading the wrong blog.  The upshot was that it blew out rods, pistons, spark plugs, wires, shafts and everything else that comprises an engine that runs on combustible fuel.  The mechanic ballparked it at $800 to $1,200 to repair my car that was worth half of that on the private market for spare parts.

It was a bittersweet day when I was at work and had the car towed away for scrap by Victory Auto Wreckers.  I had received my first parking ticket ever from our Village, rightly so, for having a car that blocked the road after it snowed this early January.  We received $120 for the car, which I quickly spent on a few meals out and handing a few twenties to my kids.

What I did that very Saturday last November when my trusty rusty old Subaru died was made my way to a local Subaru dealership.  I do not just like Subarus, I love them.  If I had five million bucks, I would certainly buy myself something like a Porsche or high-end Volvo for when I wanted to drive such a car.  But I would spend my days driving to places that I needed to go in a Subaru.  I would purchase the new Ascent that is coming out next year that both the salesman and a recent email from Subaru told me about.  In my real life, I cannot afford such a car although I suspect that other people who make the same as I do or even less may purchase this car with whopping payments for years and years.

Our new Subaru

The new Subaru Legacy that I leased on Saturday, November 25th, for three years with $2,900 down and payments of $267 per month came with Sirius XM (finally!).  It came on a trial basis that was set to expire a few weeks ago in late March, right around the time of my wife’s birthday.

I had originally provided my home address as well as my Yahoo! email address to the Subaru dealership, the finance company and Sirius XM, thus I continually received offers via USPS and email to extend Sirius XM past the trial date.

With the exception of the last few, I immediately deleted the emails and tore up the paper mail immediately upon receiving them.

Damned if I was going to pay one red cent for satellite radio!

Upon one of their many communiques marked Urgent! and before sending it to our recycle bin, I stated as much to my wife.

“What kind of idiot do they take me for?  Thinking that I would pay to listen to the radio.”

“I kind of like it, and it would make a nice birthday present,” my wife replied.

Rather than being the level-headed, even-keeled middle aged mensch that I strive to be, I replied in a mixture of surprise and (almost) anger.

“Well, I’m not getting that for you,” I said.  Or something close enough to that.  “I hate paying monthly fees and don’t want another one.”  Both true statements.

Once I had thought about it a bit, worked on a blog post for a while and thought about my upcoming trip to New Orleans with my son, my thinking began to change somewhat.

I had also just recently read an article about how upper middle class families typically prefer services and experiences over more unnecessary items.  Although I have not (yet) cracked into the upper middle class echelon like my two younger siblings and most of my friends have, it got me thinking nonetheless.

I have been married for going on twenty-two years and my wife and I were together for over six years prior.  We met before I turned twenty, and I am now forty-seven.  We have known each other for a long time.

She also knows something that I know all too well about myself, and that is that I am most definitely a procrastinator when it comes to many, if not most, things.

Thus, I would have been shopping for a present on the night before her birthday at some retail store and would have bought something that she would say is nice or that she likes, just being nice, but I would only rarely if ever see her wear or use whatever that item may be.  There is also the great risk of me not getting the right size, which is a big No No no matter how long you’ve been married.  Too small and she is upset about not fitting into it and too big and she thinks that you think she is even bigger than she is.

Plus, I would probably spend about a hundred bucks anyway.  Years after being married, I spent a few hundred bucks on a birthstone ring for her in a gold band, but I typically spend a hundred or less on her birthday gift.  I do not recall her ever wearing the ring.

Thus, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made for me to get her something that she wants, something that will not hang in our closet or in her jewelry box for eternity, or an item that would sit on our shelves taking up space. 

So Sirius XM it was.

You would think that after signing up for an additional year at the low, low rate of $10 per month, plus all the taxes and fees that were added on after I filled everything out, that would be the end of it.

Sirius added up to $118 for a year.

But No!  There’s more!

Even though I provided my wife’s email account as the primary contact for their streaming services, they now send me ever-more urgent emails wanting to verify which address to send things to.

They are Sirius-ly pestering me with emails that I do not find urgent.

Good grief!  Don’t these ass-holes know that I get over a hundred emails a day and every one of them seeks my attention?  Don’t they realize that sometimes a husband will sign up from one email and provide his wife’s email because it is her car and he does not give a flying fuck about emails or streaming music from Sirius?

An urgent email in my mind is if someone is actually in danger, if someone you love is in trouble or maybe you are in dire jeopardy of being fired from your job or evicted from your home.  If something happened to my mother and she could not reach me, that's urgent.

What is not urgent is verifying an email address on a satellite radio account.  Especially after you have already accurately typed in the account that you would like all further emails to go to.

If anyone from Sirius reads this, go on ahead sending me super-urgent email requests and I will go on ahead deleting them.  If you fuck around with my wife’s actual account because of this, well, then that would prompt me to call and explain it.  I hope that would be to an actual person and not a friendly female robot voice.

So now I Sirius-ly have paid $118 for my wife and whoever else drives or rides in the new Subaru to enjoy whatever music he or she chooses on demand.  I Sirius-ly refuse to pay twice as much after my “one year special” expires next March.  I will have to plan more in advance to buy my wife some Disney-inspired attire that she would love.  I love her a lot, but refuse at this point in time to pay the full freight for satellite radio.

I Sirius-ly do.