My own private shock 'n awe

I have a thing for Bravo TV. It's a sickness really. They have the best reality shows. I love Project Runway, Top Chef, Make Me a Supermodel, Top Design (if it comes back...)....and even sometimes enjoy watching Flipping Out. Project Runway and Top Chef are two things that my husband and I watch together, sort of like our weekly Wednesday night date. So imagine my horror last night when we sat down and turned the TV to channel 72, which is supposed to be Bravo, only to be confronted with this image:
No big deal, yes? I change the station to 85...and get static. Nothing. Zilch. Not even a fuzzy picture. It's blank, like there isn't even supposed to be anything there. I kept switching it back and forth, hoping for some small miracle that would suddenly bring Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum to my TV screen. Nothing.

Ordinarily this would be the sort of thing that would result in me calling the cable company and complaining very loudly until some one set things right. This is the sort of thing I'm kind of good at. This time it's different. I can't call and complain about a service that technically I don't pay for.

Here's the deal. We have very basic cable...like 20 channels and 7 of those are spanish. It's like $20 something a month, which is fine because really the only reason I needed the cable is for the internet access, which bumps our bill up to $85 a month. We pay some extra for some faster speed something-or-another, I don't know...anyway...so when the cable guy came out back when we bought our house to fix the wires that the previous home owner had severed when he installed his dish network, the cable guy hooked us up with expanded cable. On his own. Without being asked. He was quite proud and informed us that he'd done so, sort of in a "I'm the cool cable guy and you can thank me later" type of way. I figured eventually it would show up on our bill, but it never did which leads me to believe that the cable company really has no idea what they are doing anyway. i didn't feel too bad about it, considering that I spend most of my TV time watching about 5 channels anyway. Now it's a problem.

I have a tiny little ray of hope that perhaps the glitch last night was just caused by the sudden switch over and when I get home today Bravo will be restored to my cable. After all, we still get all the other expanded channels that we don't pay for. It was just these 5 that were missing. That is my hope. If not, then I'm going to have to shop around for some good cable, and this one is going to come with a DVR.