Cable TV Complaint Conundrum

     This is a long entry today about a mundane, superficial subject, but I'm venting because my sleep patterns were disrupted last night.
      Our Charter Cable TV was out last night. From 1:20a.m. until approximately 8:00a.m. Don't get me wrong; I'm not up watching TV at that ungodly hour. But my mother sometimes is.
      Surprisingly, I got a live Charter representative on the phone at that late (or is it early?) hour. She said there was an outage due to "maintenance" issues. In other words, Charter technicians were busy finding ways to re-arrange their channel line-up and annoy their customers once again.
      This the SECOND time in less than a month that our cable TV has been out during that time period. Who knows how many other times the cable TV was out when we weren't watching at that hour? To Charter's credit, they gave us a 24-discount on our next bill for the TWO nights that we were without television.
      My 20-year broadcasting career was mostly spent in the analog era of television, before we had high definition TV and digital converter boxes attached to our sets, that the cable TV company now charges its customer an extra $5.00 a month for. Why don't they just add it to their "regular" charges?
     (In the 1970s, we paid $5.00 a month for about 12 channels. Today, the lowest possible fee is over $39.00 a month for about 20 channels. In contrast, when Star Trek came out on videotape in the late 1980s, it cost $14.99 to purchase ONE episode of Star Trek on VHS. Today, a person can purchase an ENTIRE SEASON of a television series on DVD for sometimes the same price. What is wrong with this picture? Are the cable TV monopolies raking in a profit somewhere?)
     I'm tired of waking up and trying to guess where our channels are on the line-up. For example, this past month Charter switched Medford PBS-station KSYS from channel 8 (its over-the-air frequency) with one of the home shopping channels on channel 7. WHY is that necessary? Don't tell me its because the Channel 8 over-the-air frequency interferes with its reception on cable channel 8. That excuse might have flown back in the days of analog TV, but not in today's digital era.
     And when a person only receives about 20 channels on their basic TV line-up (which is what we receive due to the high cost of the "upper tiers"), is it REALLY necessary to put one station on channel 187? I mean, come on,...if our remote ever runs dead on batteries, it plays havoc trying to change from channel 22 (the weather channel), up to the next nearest channel on 93 (the Catholic channel, which we don't watch anyway), up to the next nearest channels in the 180-block.                     
      I sometimes think the cable companies just play around with things, to try and aggravate customers enough, to get them to subscribe to higher-paying options. And I don't care how many "bundle" promotions we receive in the mail each month...I am NEVER going to trust Charter with a $99.99 offer for cable TV, internet, and phone service. After one year, the price goes up, and it's next to impossible to go back to the way things "were."