Sally Breslin: My Life: MY FREE WEEKEND ENDED UP COSTING ME

I have DIRECTV, which means my TV is connected to a satellite dish. I’ve had no real problems with it, other than the fact the signal can be temperamental during bad weather. If there is a sudden downpour during the last five minutes of a movie, I can forget about ever finding out if the movie couple ended up living happily ever after...or dropped dead.

Anyway, every now and then, DIRECTV offers a free premium-channel weekend. Most of the time, it’s just one channel, like HBO or Showtime. But the weekend after Thanksgiving this year, they were offering all of the premium channels free at the same time!

Excited, I prepared for a weekend of recording as many of the movies and programs as possible while they were free. This meant first clearing out some of the hundreds of other shows and movies I’d previously recorded and hadn’t watched yet, so I could free up some space. It took a lot of time to decide what to keep and what to delete, but I finally managed to get rid of about 60 percent of my stash and make plenty of room for the new stuff. I then searched through my on-screen program guide and scheduled at least a dozen movies to be recorded during the freebie marathon.

On Thanksgiving morning, I was sitting on the sofa, enjoying the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, when suddenly, the TV screen went blank. Up popped a message that said, “Error 771. Signal lost. Click here for solutions.”

I immediately clicked and the first thing I was instructed to do was check for loose connections on the back of the TV and control box. I checked. They all were tight. It then said to press the reset button on the control box. I pressed it and waited for what seemed like 10 years for the box to reboot. When it finally did, nothing had changed. There still was no signal.

So I called DIRECTV. The technician told me to press the reset button.

“I already did that,” I said. “It didn’t work.”

“Please try again,” she said.

So I tried it. Nothing happened.

“Now try unplugging the unit, waiting a few minutes and then plugging it back in,” she suggested.

I did. Still no signal.

“Is there no signal on just one TV or on all of them?” she asked.

“No signal on any of them,” I answered.

“Oh,” she said in a tone that instantly stripped away the small sliver of optimism I still was clinging to.

“Are you having bad weather?” she asked.

“No. It’s bright and sunny out today. But yesterday, it snowed.”

“Then maybe you should go out and clear the snow off your satellite dish.”

“It’s on the highest peak of my roof, and I’m nearly 70 years old. You really want me to climb up there?”

“No!” She gasped. “I thought the dish was mounted on the side of your house, like most of them are nowadays.” She paused before adding, “Well, I think we’re going to have to send a technician to your house.”

“Good! How soon can he get here?”

“Um...first, perhaps I should inform you that the service fee is $99.”

I had hoped that because it was their satellite dish, the service would be free. After all, I wasn’t the one who’d crawled up there and caused it to stop working.

“OK,” I said, even though it pained me. “Send the technician.”

“Fine. He’ll be there around 7:45 AM on Sunday morning.”

My first two thoughts were: “I have to go without TV – and the special freebie weekend – until Sunday? I'll never survive!” and, “What kind of sadist schedules a service call for 7:45 on a Sunday morning?”

But I had no choice – I had to wait.

“Well, at least now you can catch up on watching all of the shows and movies you’ve recorded,” the tech-support woman said brightly. “You don’t need a signal for that.”

“Yeah, I have such great timing,” I muttered. “I just deleted 60 percent of my recordings to make room for all of the freebie stuff I now won’t even be getting.”

So I spent the weekend watching just about everything I’d previously recorded, all the while painfully aware of how many great new movies I was missing. By the time the technician showed up bright and early on Sunday morning, I was on the verge of popping a handful of valium.

He first checked outdoors. Then he checked indoors. He tuned my TV to a screen that said, “show signal strength.” I hadn’t seen that many zeroes since receiving my test scores in college-chemistry class.

“Where is your basement?” he asked me.

I led him to the door.

It turned out there was some kind of little converter box mounted high on the wall in the basement and it had been plugged into one of those big orange extension cords...but somehow had come unplugged. The technician plugged it back in. The zeroes on the TV screen suddenly began climbing to higher numbers so rapidly, the screen resembled a slot machine.

So I ended up spending $99 just to have someone plug an electrical cord into an extension cord.

Granted, I was pleased to have my TV signal back, especially since the free premium-channel weekend wasn’t over for another 16 hours, but I was puzzled about how something on a wall in the basement had become unplugged in the first place, especially since no one had been down there. Also, every time I’ve tried to unplug one of those big orange extension cords, I've nearly herniated some essential body part in the process, so I doubted the plug somehow had just “fallen” out of it.

Visions of a mysterious border – like a really tall rat or a giant, mutant spider – lurking somewhere in the dark and maniacally cackling as they unplugged cords in the basement, flashed through my mind.

All I can say is that even if I lose my TV signal again in the near future, I still don’t think I’ll venture down to the basement to check things out.

Nope. I’d rather spend the $99.

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