My cable provider is Comcast and they are really starting to mess with the quality of my life. It happens a few of times a week, but channels on Comcast start pixielating, freezing, blacking out and cutting in and out for a few hours. Thursday night, approximately three channels were affected by this ever increasing occurrence, and one of those was the local Fox station airing the mythical national championship football game between Florida and Oklahoma.

It was pointless trying to watch the game; as the action would disappear, the running back would dissolve on the tv screen and then reappear tackled 15 yards down the field, or the screen would completely black out. I began to believe all of this was a cruel sociological experiment to gauge my emotional intelligence or I was a part of The Matrix.

I did have the serendipitous pleasure to hear Fox's play-by-play man Tom Brennaman say, "If you're fortunate to spend 5 or 20 minutes around Tim Tebow, you're better for it."

Does Tebow perform deep tissue massage on folks or can he lay hands on the infirmed and cure people with a simple touch? The cult of Tebow is completely out of control and how much pressure is this kid under? Not only does he have to win mythical national championships, but the kid is expected to be St. Augustine.

Tim Tebow with his girlfriend? St. Augustine never had it this good.

Now, if it was only this one incident where cable television ruined my life, I would end the rant -- but that's not possible, is it?

Sunday night I am watching the Boston College men's basketball team upset the #1 ranked University of North Carolina Tar Heels in Chapel Hill. All of a sudden, NESN leaves the live action, cuts to a commercial with approximately 1:14 remaining in the game and UNC's overrated Tyler Hansbrough stepping to the free throw line to shoot two. NESN does not return to live action until there are less than six seconds on the game clock. I endured approximately eight minutes of mindless commercials, as I deliberated jumping out of a window, and commandeering a Boston MBTA bus to drive through NESN's studio.

For the record, I don't watch commercials. I am that person who grabs the remote and surfs during commercials. I am a marketer and advertiser's worse nightmare, but I was forced to watch eight consecutive minutes of commercials desperately praying for NESN to return to the game I had looked forward to all freaking day. I was really into the game -- yelling at the refs, berating the Town & Country Carolina fans and hating on the Heels. Life was great ... until.

Strangely enough, a half-hour before the Heidi moment, I emphatically stated to my girlfriend that NESN would switch to the Virginia Tech - Duke game before B.C.'s upset of UNC had concluded. Her response was, "You think so?"

The opening part of NESN's telecast was shaky and I was confident further incompetence was in the air. Hey, on the weekends, the rookies are working and crap always seems to fall apart at these precious moments. It's analogous to the survival rate of heart attack victims on certain days and times in the emergency room - you don't want to have a heart attack on a Saturday night at 3:00 a.m. Don't even bother calling the ambulance. You have a better chance of zapping yourself to life with your car battery.  

The kicker in all of this, we all pay for cable television. I pay NESN, via Comcast, a fee every month. How can NESN screw up the biggest game of the season for Boston College? Will NESN or Comcast refund me a dime for this failure of service? No, they'll stick it up my ass, just as every other crappy cable system and local cable sports channel has done in the lifetime of cable television.

Back in the day, you didn't pay to watch television and these "routing" errors were still painful, but it wasn't costing people any dough. You could blame it on the wind, the rain, solar flares, the crappy antennae attached to the roof purchased at Myron's TV Appliance store or the tin foil wrapped rabbit ears from 1961.

Being a sports fan is tough, but owning a cable system or cable channel is a nice racket. America is a great country.