Last night while we were watching The Invaders on DVD, SharkBoy mumbles “The cable just went out.”

Lo and behold, two red Rogers trucks were blocking the back alley. One guy was up a ladder onto the pole outside our back door, the other was at the base, looking up, talking on a cell. As I approach, I can hear the cellboy say, “I guess order 100 metres of cable.”

“Hi,” I say with a smile to the Ladderboy, as he comes down, “I know you guys are busy, just wondering how long we’ll be in blackout.”

Ladderboy sighs. Looks at a laptop on the hood of the truck. Sighs again. Pause. I’m about to apologize for interrupting when he says “A couple hours at least. There’s a severed cable and Bell needs to remove some of their cable too and we can’t do anything until they’re here.”

“We have it all – Cable, phone, internet. You’ve killed my Friday night,” I say with a light manner. In all seriousness, I can find something to do, but the phone being knocked out always gets me concerned. After months of sporadic service, we just went through 8 months of no problems at all. I don’t want to spend another minute playing “reset the modem”.

“Call in for a credit,” he says without humour. And he’s back to his laptop before I can say “how?”.

I turn back to the house and wonder why we sacrificed competitive pricing for the ease of one bill, one company.