Part two

Then in the afternoon after William got home he asked if he could watch some TV. He likes watching in the living room because we have more channels than in my bedroom. So I let him watch on the “big” TV. We also have “On Demand” on the big TV. William recently figured out how to work this feature of the cable.

“On Demand” for those of you who don’t have it is a storage of movies & shows on the, cable box, that you can watch any time with just a press of the remote control. They change them each month to keep it fresh. William has only ventured into the Disney XD channel. He knows to press 1 on the remote then find the kids block, then under kids he can find PBS kids, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Disney XD and some other channels that have shows he likes.

On Demand also has a feature where you can rent movies. They have new movies for $4.99 and older movies for $2.99. So the baby is being picked up and I walked them out to the car and come back to hear William say I think I’m watching “hotel for dogs”. Now this is a new title so I got very worried when he said that. I told him not to press anything else I would be there in a minute.

So I go over and stop the movie he is watching, it was an older title so I thought maybe it was a free movie. NOT the case! I look and it’s a $2.99 movie. I think to myself, that’s not to bad, we can watch it tonight and I’ll teach him what movies he’s not allowed to watch because you have to “buy” them for the day. Then the light bulb goes on and I’m thinking back to about 30 minutes before this when he was watching “Horton hears a who”. At the time he said he was watching it I thought this was an old movie and may be a free one on HBO. NOT the case.

I decided I needed to go into the saved portion of the “On Demand” feature. This is where all the movies and shows you have watched sit for 24 hours in case you had to stop in the middle or wanted to watch a second time you can just find it there real fast. Oh was I surprised when I went to the saved programs. Here is what I saw

Homeward Bound II $2.99
Ella Enchanted $2.99
E.T. $2.99
Dr. Seuss’ Horton $4.99
Bolt $4.99
BeverlyHills Chihuahua $4.99

Then there were about 10 other show titles that were free. William was trying to find a show to watch and he just clicked on the movie (not knowing you had pay for them) watched the start of the movie for about 2 minutes then turned it off and moved on to another movie to watch.

I started doing math in my head and totaled it up to $24.00! $24.00 for movies we had already watched, for movies that I have on video tape, movies that are on “regular” channels for FREE!
I sent him into my room where he couldn’t run my cable bill through the roof any more and I got on the phone with the cable company.

Now I always have a problem when I call the cable company, it just never goes well and it’s always a fight. So I geared up for the fight but I was going to try to be “oh so kind” first. The man on the other end was wonderful!!!!!! I explained what happened and he asked what the titles were. I told him the first two and he stared laughing. He said he could see all the titles and they were all “rented” 2 minutes apart, which basically meant he believed me that the kid did it. You rent a movie and have it for 24 hours, so had it been 2 hours later he would have thought I had watched the movies, so it was a good thing I caught him when I did.

I gave both kids a nice little lesson on “On Demand”. They now know how to check to see if something is free or if you have to pay for it. Hopefully I will not have any more problems until William is a teenage boy and figures out all the Pay per view channels:-0 Maybe I’ll go lock those right now!