TV Klutz

I am a TV klutz. It's not because I don't watch TV. I LOVE certain programs. It's because I have never had control of the remote in my life.

When I was a kid I had an older brother who controlled the TV set and the three stations we were able to pull with our rabbit ears antennae. Later when I lost my hearing in my twenties, I let my roommate control the set. Why not? I wasn't interested since there wasn't any captioning. That lasted a good fifteen years.

Then, in the 90s TV shows started being captioned. By that time I had a husband who walked around with the remote glued to his hand when we were both home. We got more TV's, but then I had sons who learned to model their fathers TV habit. Whoever controlled the remote RULED. I gave up.

Somewhere between then and now television has became more complicated. Our digital cable has hundreds of channels. You have to go through about 17 steps to put the captioning on the HDTV after telling it to disconnect from the computer game thingy it's hooked up to. Then you have choices between HD programs or not-- hundreds and hundreds of choices. The TV guide has endless listings of stations. One day in TV guide equals pages and pages of charted out programming you may or may not receive depending on your cable company and package you've chosen. It's overwhelming. I long for the old days when we had just three stations and the NBC color peacock. I KNEW which station my programs were on and how to operate my TV.

Tonight my daughter called home with an urgent question--

"Is DAD home?"

"No."

"How about Tom?"

"No."

"Alex?"

"I'm home alone."

"Do you know how to work on-demand?"

"What's that?"

"Where is everyone?? ON DEMAND! It's on the TV!"

"What do you need, you could tell me."

"Yeah-- OK-- turn to channel one."

"How do I do that?"

"Press. . .the. . .ON. . . button. . . Pick. . .up. . .the. . .remote. . .and. . . press. . . number. . .one."

And so-- I learned how to operate ON DEMAND tonight. You go to station number one. There is a menu after that. It wasn't as complicated as I previously thought. I found out I can watch any (ANY!) of my favorite "Curb Your Enthusiasm" programs any time I want. What a great idea!