Dear Urban Diplomat: should I rat out my landlord for stealing cable?
Dear Urban Diplomat,
I live in a ground-floor suite and pay my own utilities, including cable. My landlord lives above me, and we have a good relationship. However, I just noticed a splitter thingy coming off of my Rogers cable box. I Googled it and sent a photo to my friend who installs cable for a living, and now I’m 95 per cent sure my landlord is stealing my cable. I’m annoyed that he’s getting free TV on my dime, and I’m a little worried that a Rogers technician will eventually notice and I’ll get dinged somehow. What to do?
—TV Drama Star, Leslieville
You’ve done nothing wrong. If you’d rewired things yourself or were enjoying the fruits of stolen programming, then you’d be culpable. Are you morally or legally obligated to rat out your landlord? I say no. It’s not a B&E, and Rogers rarely penalizes for it, so don’t lose sleep fearing the knock-knock of a glowering cable man. Rogers does warn that someone in your circumstances may experience a decrease in the quality of the feed or periodic service outages. If that happens, I suggest you broach it with your freeloading landlord before dropping a dime on him.
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Dear Urban Diplomat,
I live in a ground-floor suite and pay my own utilities, including cable. My landlord lives above me, and we have a good relationship. However, I just noticed a splitter thingy coming off of my Rogers cable box. I Googled it and sent a photo to my friend who installs cable for a living, and now I’m 95 per cent sure my landlord is stealing my cable. I’m annoyed that he’s getting free TV on my dime, and I’m a little worried that a Rogers technician will eventually notice and I’ll get dinged somehow. What to do?
—TV Drama Star, Leslieville
You’ve done nothing wrong. If you’d rewired things yourself or were enjoying the fruits of stolen programming, then you’d be culpable. Are you morally or legally obligated to rat out your landlord? I say no. It’s not a B&E, and Rogers rarely penalizes for it, so don’t lose sleep fearing the knock-knock of a glowering cable man. Rogers does warn that someone in your circumstances may experience a decrease in the quality of the feed or periodic service outages. If that happens, I suggest you broach it with your freeloading landlord before dropping a dime on him.
Send your questions to the Urban Diplomat at urbandiplomat@torontolife.com){kind=link}
With the switch to digital cable and digital boxes, splitting cable will not give your landlord access to ‘free tv’ or your cable package.
The only thing your landlord is going to get is analog channels 2-28, the last holdout in the transition to digital. These channels are not apart of any cable subscription, and are transmitted along all active coax cables. I don’t even think you can consider stealing.
Snitches end up in ditches. With stitches.
I get TL’s answer, as long as you don’t put a fist through a window or kick down a door, it’s not really stealing.
I get it. So if it’s all a free for all, every morning, get up before your landlord and take their news paper. It’s not really stealing since they print a lot of them. Oh, did you write in because you found an old issue of Toronto Life, don’t worry. Some sucker paid for it.
I would say that if you have a Rogers guy coming by, mention what you’ve noticed ( free months for you my friend). As for your Landlord, well, he can keep writing Toronto Life advice stories.