Look, Touch, But Don't Ride

Gripmen grip only your cameras

In news you may have missed,

The cable cars are back — but only for photos

The cable cars are back, and did indeed roll down the streets — but only to pose for pictures, welcome passersby and tourists and let them ring the bell at the Powell Street turntable...

Leonard Oats, a cable car gripman for 21 years, said the goal was to get the cable cars back in the sunlight and the public view and to give visitors, who are slowly returning, a chance to see one of the city’s top attractions — even if they can’t ride them.

Cable Car museum and operations center
where the wheels keep spinning

Six months into the lockdown the City judges that a Potemkin-like experience is better than none. And why not? Disney World proved that a façade is worth a thousand pictures.

The visitors will go home with T-shirts and memories that might even be pleasant enough to induce them to return.

It does seem incongruous, though, to tow the trolley to Powell St. station when the cable sounds like it's running perfectly well under the street.

Although the clank and whir of the underground cable could be heard Saturday morning, Cable Car 26 made its way to Powell Street pulled by a tow truck.

“We weren’t allowed to grip the cable,” Oats said, sounding somewhat disappointed.

The logic and workings of SF Muni will always be puzzling to this humble observer.

Improving Picture

After we had our flatscreen TV delivered, DirecTV came the next day to upgrade the old satellite dish and digital video recorder to high-definition. It took the installer a couple of hours to mount the new dish in a different location (it was heavier and needed more support) and only another hour to hook up the DVR and TV.

The installer noted the household demographic and asked a couple of times if we wanted to add Mandarin channels. [NFL and MLB (baseball) are more in my sweet spot, but if I bought more channels I’d feel obligated to spend even more time in front of the can’t-call-it-tube-anymore.] No thanks.

Chafing under the cable monopoly, we switched to satellite when it became available five years ago and have been happy with the decision. The signal comes through clearly, and service interruptions are extremely rare. Also, unlike Comcast, DirecTV’s price hikes have been modest. HD service is a few dollars more, but when I called them today with a question, they knocked off $5 per month for six months. A small amount, a lagniappe, that sweetened the phone call.

Perhaps DirecTV wouldn’t have been as attentive without competition; AT&T, Comcast, and Dish are all vying for our eyeballs. And perhaps that’s a lesson we can apply to other industries.

Cheaper and Better

A little over two weeks ago I wrote how I was doing a slow burn over Comcast's frequent, exorbitant price hikes. The last straw was Comcast's $54 billion bid to acquire Disney. My hard-earned shekels will not be going toward service improvement but toward the acquisition and dismemberment of a unique company that has given pleasure to generations of Americans. Comcast has the right to do what it's doing, and I have the right to not purchase their product.

I went to the local Best Buy and ordered DirecTV. My first year's cost will be:

Non-premium channels (over 150) $40 x 12 months = $480
HBO - 7 channels, 3 months free, $12 x 9 months = $108
TiVo and 2nd receiver service, $10 x 12 months = $120
TiVo eqpt + 1 receiver + 1 satellite dish, less rebate = $100

SUBTOTAL $808

Installation is free, and taxes will raise the total to at most $900.

Comcast is billing us $94 ($1,128 over 12 months), so we will save over $200 in the first year. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison because we will not be subscribing to as many premium channels; on the other hand, we have TiVo.

Today we had our dish installed. The signal is clearer to both our sets and we are beginning to appreciate the hard-to-explain technological breakthrough that is TiVo (digital videorecording). I derived immense satisfaction from terminating our Comcast account and explaining to the harried customer service representative that we were switching because of price (and a large dollop of corporate arrogance, which I refrained from mentioning because it wasn't the poor guy's fault). He offered to reduce his price to match the competition, but for us it was too little, too late. As for you, gentle Comcast subscriber, it surely doesn't hurt to pick up the phone and ominously hint at your displeasure.

It was indeed a lovely day. © 2004 Stephen Yuen