HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

When we last left off with the saga of the Oak Bluffs couple who had purchased the whole Comcast Bundle (Internet, landline, TV cable), the husband and wife were learning to share the remote control. Recap: the wife ceded the clicker over to the husband who then proceeded to watch 16 hours of ball games. In other words, all was well on God’s little green acre. And then everything turned to peacock petutti.

The first thing the couple noticed was that their brand new landline was of no use to them. They may as well have received the gift of an egg coddler: What do you do with it? When do you use it? And why? The worst thing about the landline was that the phone number looked foreign. It had nothing to do with what we’ve long associated with Vineyard digits. What happened to 693 and 696 or even the 939 of the 1990s? Forget about it! This number was prefixed at 687, a trio of digits that fairly screamed, “I just got off the boat, found a realtor up the street, overpaid for a cottage surrounded by fetid chicken coops and, by the way, how do I hook up with I-95? I need to be in Framingham in half an hour!”

The next creepy aspect of the Bundle (such a warm, group huggy kind of term) was that the first bill arrived within a week and a half of the new service. Mr. and Mrs. Innocent, neither of whom were heretofore avid TV watchers, had cavalierly sprung for the deluxe package with HBO, SHOWTIME and other special programs. The quoted price was $159. Well, of course, leave it to a corporate entity to pack in extra incomprehensible charges – and we can only approximate them here – “adjunct communications advisory tax,” “exploratory quantum reverb” — and suddenly the monthly $159 goes over the $200 mark. Also, in a heart-stopping maneuver, the company billed the couple an extra $280 for hooking up the system. In other words, 13 days into their Bundle, they were looking at a bill of $445.83.

There is no local Comcast number listed in Island phone books, yet Mr. and Mrs. Freaking Out very much desired to keep this situation monitored somewhere west of Mumbai. They drove to the office in the Airport Business District and talked to a nice lady behind a partition. Without a word of corporate gobbledygook, she whacked the massive set-up fees down to $50.

Two weeks later in October, the couple received a new bill, this one with November’s service tacked on, so again they were looking at a honking big bill of $400-plus dollars.

Five weeks into the Bundle experience, the wife took a long gimlet-eyed look at the man who used to quote T.S. Eliot, discuss the Punic Wars, and dissertate on modern politics, and who was fully capable of devouring a novel a day. She asked him even as his eyes were glued on a player’s golf swing, “Have you read a single book since we got this TV package?” He shook his head, then cried, “Oh man, he shanked it!”

To save the marriage — and because they simply could not afford those bills, they legged it over to the Comcast office, turned in their TV box, cancelled the useless landline, and asked to retain nothing but the bare bones basic TV cable and Internet hookup.

“We can’t afford the Bundle,” they humbly admitted.

The woman handed them a new, smaller modem for the Internet, along with an instructional DVD to help them plunge into their own tech work.

Back at home, Mr. and Mrs. Befuddled pulled out desk drawers, walked around the outlets, jabbed plugs where they assuredly should never have been jabbed, thrust the DVD into the wife’s computer but had no luck in getting it to play, scratched their foreheads — their own, each other’s, and the dog’s — and finally decided they didn’t need an Internet connection after all. The husband had wireless access, and the wife actually and sincerely enjoyed cycling through the Camp Ground and up School street to the library to use its Internet-laden computers.

Their new Comcast bill? Well, it should weigh in around $30 but there’ll likely be a fee for “airwave transference redux” or some such. Now the only question is, what do you do with a husband in the grip of sports-I.V. withdrawal?

The O.B. School this weekend is launching its production of Annie, directed by Shelagh Smilie with musical direction by Brian Weiland. Performances are Friday, Nov. 19 at 7 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 20, also at 7 p.m., with a matinee on Sunday, Nov. 21 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $7, $5 for students. Whole families of whatever size may attend for $25.