Yeah, I know. I missed my weekly deadline. So sue me.

I paid my Comcast bill today. I usually pay bills by phone, and I was surprised that I couldn’t get an automated system this time. Eventually the phone tree led me to a human representative. It wasn’t until she asked me for my home phone number, which I had already typed on the phone keypad on my way there, that I realized the problem: I had entered my old phone number.

Since the human being was already there, I went ahead and did my payment with her. When we were finished, she ended the call saying, "Thank you for choosing Comcast." They always say that. I’m sure it must be in their script. In setting up our cable and internet service after the recent move we experienced multiple snafus (including a few really fubar snafus), so I spent lots of time on the phone with various branches of Comcast. Every time, they ended the call with "Thank you for choose Comcast."

The irony is that I tried very hard not to choose Comcast (I believe Comcast is a member of the corporate axis of evil), but ultimately I failed. Choices aren’t completely absent, but they’re pretty scarce. Now that cable TV has taken over, broadcast television is nearly non-existent. On the one hand, one can choose to simply do without television, as I did at my last residence. On the other, one can get a satellite dish, but that’s expensive enough that isn’t worth it unless you really want to buy a lot of TV. For anywhere in between, you have to get cable, and if you live in Seattle your only choice for cable is Comcast.

There are ways to watch some TV shows on the Internet, but that leads to the question of getting a high-speed connection. I had dialup before, but it was rather slow even for me, and unacceptably slow for Ericka. DSL is impossible at our new home due to the geography of the phone line connection to the nearest station. It’s also possible to get a connection through a satellite dish, but that’s even more overpriced than satellite TV. That leaves only cable. I was determined not to have Comcast as my ISP, so I arranged my cable internet connection through Earthlink, but Earthlink simply partners though Comcast, which is the only cable provider in the area. Technically my ISP is Earthlink, but the bill still comes from Comcast.

That’s why they say "Thank you for choosing Comcast" — to delude you into thinking that they aren’t really a monopoly. I remember years ago when I lived in California, Pacific Bell used to thank me for choosing them to provide phone service, even though there was no one else to choose.

Do non-monopolies ever say this? Not that I can remember. By unhappy chance, I bank at Wells Fargo (another member of the axis of evil), but the bank tellers there never say, "Thank you for choosing Wells Fargo." If they did, customers might wake up and say, "Hey, that’s right, I do have a choice," and move their money somewhere else. They don’t want to remind us. It’s only the monopolies that do that.

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