While I’m not technically a cable employee, I write about the industry here on DST. And, for some people, that seems to grant full license to give me an earful about their cable experiences.

A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of an interview for a local moving company when the manager, looking over my previous employment, asked about my arrangement with DST. After a quick explanation he sat back and said, “I hate my cable. It’s terrible.”

The utter bewilderment must have registered in my face because he continued by saying, “It’s the delay. I sit watching football on my HDTV and if my kids are watching the game in another room, I know what happens seconds before I watch it unfold in front of me. Sometimes my brother will call me and tell me what happens while I’m still on commercial break!” Astonished by the sudden outburst yet still hoping to be hired for the job, I bit my tongue and silently made note of his complaint while nodding my head.

Leaving the interview, I began to draw conclusions from my interviewer’s passionate outburst. For one, he’s obviously upset by the HD delay caused by the increase in information that takes longer to code and then decode when it gets to the consumer’s box. It’s a common complaint—nothing new there. Over time, as compression technology improves, the delay should eventually fade away.

Just days later, while visiting a friend at his vacation home on the shore of Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, I got to talking with his parents about the issues they face with choosing a triple play provider. A lengthy conversation about cable vs. telcos vs. satellite ensued. For now, they said, they’re sticking with cable. Why? The customer service. While they feel picture quality of the digital cable is poor, and the Internet is blazing fast, cable wins in this situation because of their personal commitment to customer satisfaction. “If I ever call them up, which is usually to threaten to cancel my service, I get someone on the other end who isn’t stationed in some far off place reading from a script. They’re local, they know what they’re doing, and they’re usually pretty helpful. It’s not the same if I call the phone company.”

There will always be a struggle to offer consumers exactly what they want. Each is different. The passion with which people talk about cable, both good and bad, reflects the basic need they feel for a simple, reliable service to bring them the technology they crave.

Tony Brown is a sophomore at University of Missouri