| Thursday, February 02, 2006 |
| 48 Hours |
As we reach a full two days of hospital time, with both wife and baby healthy, and still waiting on the big event, I focus my thoughts on some little observations from the past two days. Try this one on for size.
Printed on every television in this hospital [or at least the two rooms we've had so far] is the following announcement:
"Local Phone/TV Service is $7.50 per day"
Now I have definite issues here. Call the doctor because I feel a rant coming on.
First I ask, why lump these two services together? Since when do phones and TV go hand in hand? Of course you could say that Time Warner Cable now provides phone service so "shut-it, Steve," but you don't have to get those services together. With cell phones, we have little use for the room line- and don't get on me about not using cell phones in the hospital, because EVERYONE HERE is doing it!
You might think that the substantial price for the services would mean they have high-tech gadgets to use. You would be wrong. We're watching a Zenith 16-inch television that won't show the entire screen. Watching the Kentucky game last night, we could only see half of the score. A game is a lot less interesting when you have no idea who's winning. And there's no "push-button" remote so, to change the channels, you have to go through every channel along the way. If you're want to watch channel 43 and you accidentally hit the button and go past that channel, you have to start again at channel one and start all over. Oh, and the phone is nothing to write home about either.
Finally do the math here. If you factor this out over the course of a month, which is how long we could possibly be here. That would be $225. Normally telephone and cable would cost about $70 per month. I think I could buy a TV and phone for the remaining $155. This is a racket if I've ever seen one. No wonder the hospital can afford this huge expansion.
With so much downtime on our hands this is a service that I refuse to do without. We'll see just how good our health insurance is [the sign also says that the charges will show up on our home telephone bill. Seeing as we don't use Cincinnati Bell, this might be difficult for the hospital]. We have to have television to watch so now I'm using the phone all the time, randomly calling people around the city. The dialogue goes something like this: "Hey, it's Steve here. My wife's having a baby at Good Sam hospital. We're paying for this phone call. So what do you want to talk about?"
Gotta go. It's time for Survivor . . . |
yet another musing of steve-o @ 7:57:00 PM  |
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