Cable Television Quotes

“Until you accept that you’ll never get your problem fixed, whatever it is, you’ll be endlessly transferred from department to department until our call center closes. Sometimes you’ll be left on hold even after everyone at the call center has left for the day. Until you get exhausted with our run-around service and give up all hope, you’ll be stuck in The Circle Jerk. Right now, this very minute, you’re in The Circle Jerk, sir. Do you wish to continue circling or are you going to hang up your phone and go watch TV?”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We’re creatures of habit when it comes to mobile contracts and the wires piping high-speed data into our homes. It’s a pain to deal with transfers, installations, and customer service interactions, so we shrug and keep paying a premium.”
― Ian Lamont, Personal Finance For Beginners In 30 Minutes, Volume 1: How to cut expenses, reduce debt, and better align spending & priorities

“Are your kids better off watching 10 hours of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel every week?”
― Ian Lamont, Personal Finance For Beginners In 30 Minutes, Volume 1: How to cut expenses, reduce debt, and better align spending & priorities

“I told him it would be a week, seven to ten days to get a new line. He said through his teeth he needed an exact day. I gave him my supervisor's number. This whole time, his wife was in the kitchen wiping a clean counter.

I was filling out the work orders and emailing my supervisor to give him a heads-up on a possible call from a member of every cable tech's favorite rage cult when his wife knocked on my van window. She stepped back and called me "ma'am." Which was nice. Her husband with the tucked-in polo shirt had asked my name and I told him Lauren. He heard Lawrence because it fit what he saw and asked if he could call me Larry. Guys like that use your name as a weapon. "Larry, explain to me why I had to sit around here from one to three waiting on you and you show up at 3:17. Does that seem like good customer service to you, Larry? And now you're telling me seven to ten days? Larry, I'm getting really tired of hearing this shit." Guys like that, it was safer to just let them think I was a man.

She said she was sorry about him. I said, "It's fine." I said there really wasn't anything I could do. She blinked back the flood of tears she'd been holding since god knows when. She said, "It's just, when he has Fox, he has Obama to hate. If he doesn't have that . . . " She kept looking over her shoulder. She was terrified of him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just need him to have Fox." I got out of my van.”
― Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

“Before the advent of HBO and Showtime, it wasn't so easy to make a TV character swear like a sailor, cowboy, or mobster.”
― Mark Peters, Yada, Yada, Doh!: 111 Television Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society