Are you paying too much for Shaw Cable?

Has any one noticed the changes dealing with Shaw lately?  I have always told everyone how impressed I was with their service, you could always call them with a problem and they had a solution.

Now it takes 4 hours to get thru to ask a question, they will do a call back but, where will you be in 4 hours?  While you are on hold you will hear a recorded message offering great career opportunities at Shaw.  So we get it, they are understaffed!
It took a month for me to get thru to a person who could fix the settings on my email.....mostly cause I could never wait the 4 hours or I missed the call back, and then I left it for a few days, anyway when you do get thru they have an answer.

• Last week we wanted to watch a canucks hockey game, 
• Last year we got the games on HD  (love HD the picture is so much clearer, nicer to watch)
• This year the games are on Sportsnet pacific, channel # 23 we get this channel but the HD version #218, we do not get!
• At some point this year, Shaw changed the whole channel line up, we lost all those time shift channels # 70's thru 80's and a bunch of other stuff.  Apparently that was around March 2011 when they switched to this new Shaw Plan Personalizer.
• Am I the only one who didn't know it would be cheaper to change to this personalizer??

I played with the online Shaw Plan Personalizer on the weekend, trying to figure out how much more it would cost me to get Sportsnet Pacific, it was very confusing, .... all the channels come in packages that are cheaper than buying just one channel......it looked like it was going to cost me a lot more money and my shaw bill is already $180+ per month ( I have phone and internet in there as well).

Anyway I picked some stuff and hit the button to "Order Now"  This gives you a message that a customer service agent will call you the next business day.  It took 3 days, but at least I did not have to wait on hold.

The agent spent a long time trying to explain all these channel combos to me, It just did not make sense....basically she could change my plan to include #218 sportsnet pacific along with about 70 other channels for $5.00 more than I was paying now????    Well I don't really need all those channels there is nothing usually on them anyway, I rather pay less and have just what I have now plus the sports net pacific......guess what, it would be more expensive to do it that way???

So I stopped trying to understand and now have the 70 extra channels, it quite nice so far, cause you no longer get that blank screen when you select a channel that you don't subscribe to.

But now I wonder

• how much I really should have been paying for the lesser channels I had since March 2011?  

OMG I get it now, they had to make it more expensive to keep it as is, and add one channel, that way I can't complain about being charged too much since the change in March!

• But why did they take all those channels away in the first place? Why not just send me a letter saying "for $5 extra you can have this channel line up" ?????

If I am not making sense to you, don't worry......just call Shaw or email make sure you are getting your money's worth.