You know the day has gone off the rails when you sit down to write a blog post about how off you’re feeling and just can’t quite muster the right words to deliver the message. It’s not been a particularly bad day, a busy one, but not bad in the grand scheme of how bad days can get. I think I just need a few hours of uninterrupted quiet. Even as I’m sitting here writing this, the drone of the air conditioner in the next room is starting to get annoying. A more introspective person might wonder why that is. For now I’m more firmly in the camp of those who say “meh” and head to the kitchen to find a cold beer. I usually like to watch television programs that teach me something, but tonight I think I’ll be more than pleased to find something that lets me be perfectly mindless. Have you seen television lately? Yeah. I don’t think that will be a problem.
Tag Archives: television
TV Time…
I had a good plan. No, seriously. I really did have a good plan. The 42 inch TV currently in the living room was going to the basement “media room”. This new venue should be more conducive to reducing glare and cutting my cooling bill this summer. Hiding in the basement when it’s a gagillion degrees in July and August just seems to make more sense than running the 18,000 BTU window unit flat out for weeks on end. Moving the TV was easy enough and I had a small TV packed away that would be more than sufficient for background noise when I happened to be in the kitchen or fiddling around upstairs. What I didn’t account for was that nice little TV having only a single set of old school standard component cable connections, so I can plug in the cable box or the DVD player, but not both at the same time. And forget plugging in anything fancy like Apple TV or XBox. Apparently, this TV has been in storage for a while. I didn’t even know they made flat panels without HDMI ports.
This leaves me in a bit of a dilema. I can leave things as they are, with the TV in the basement and nothing in the upstairs living room. I can plug in the baby TV in the living room and try using it as what’s basically a radio with moving pictures. Or I can bight the bullet and head over to Delaware this afternoon and try finding a new TV that doesn’t send me screaming to the poor house.
The part of me that loves shiny new toys really wants to put the 42 inch TV back in the living room and bring home a 50 inch screen for the basement. The part of me that just finished paying the bill for moving here really, really wants to avoid doing that. The compromise might have to be finding a no-frills (read: cheap) 32 inch model for the living room and letting things in the basement be for the time being. It can’t hurt to stop in at Best Buy and have a look, right? I mean, since I have to go to Petsmart and pick up dog food anyway, it only makes sense to look around a bit.
Finally…
It’s probably not a surprise to anyone who knows me that March Madness doesn’t garner much more from me than the occasional “uh huh” when someone tries to bring it up in conversation. I know approximately as much about basketball as I know about partial physics. Actually that’s not true, I read a book about noteable physicists once, which I can’t say for basketball players. So it’s possible there is no topic I know less about than the fine points of college basketball. But still here I sit with the semi-finals playing in the living room.
Sigh. The trials and tribulations of being a semi-good son.
Most Powerful…
There was a time when I thought being president would have to be the coolest job in the world. You live in a big, fancy house surrounded by armed guards to keep out the riffraff. You have your own jumbo jet and helicopter. You’re followed around by a guy whose only missing in life is to be ready to help you destroy the world at a moment’s notice. You’re President of the United States, dude. Come on, the only way you could be more impressive is to have a nice fancy uniform (I’m told the chicks dig that). As POTUS, it’s got to feel like you’re in the catbird’s seat and riding high with the last job you’re ever going to worry about having.
At some point, though, you’re going to realize being Commander-in-Chief doesn’t bring quite as much power and authority as you were promised as a kid. As president, you’d think it would be easy enough to hop on live TV and give the country a little pep talk. Except that your sworn enemies have already scheduled the night you really want. And your second choice date has been co-opted by the National Football League for the season’s opening game. Let’s face it, no matter how awesome your title, you don’t want to be the guy who makes the networks cut away from football, right?
So there you have it. You’re the most powerful man in the world and you just got played by the television schedule. That’s got to be a special kind of frustrating, I’d think.
Where credit is due…
I was all set to come back to the house tonight and write a scathing rant about Comcast. Give their track record, I didn’t think they’d have a prayer of restoring service today. Happily, I would have been dead wrong in that assessment. So now I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. Less than 36 hours after the lines came down, I’m back up and running with TV and internet. No fuss, no resetting boxes, just walked in turned things on and the signal was there. Nice job, Comcast. You done good this time around and I appreciate that.
Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky and I’ll have something to rant about.
Telling tales about the end of the world…
I was really warmed up to take the worst that Mother Nature could dish out… and as usual, Mother Nature turns out to mostly be a pansy. Her worst, at the moment, would appear to be denying me access to cable television and high speed Internet. Both of these are annoyances to be sure, but not quite the mayhem and chaos we had been promised earlier in the week.
I know there are flooded basements, trees downed, and homes lost out there, but for most of us in the all-Irene-all-the-time news cycle, all this experience has really served to do is reinforce the already strong notion that weather is almost always over-hyped and under performing. That’s a pity, because the time in the future when calls of imminent destruction go out and it’s not just a drill, most of us are going to shrug, go on about our business, and think we’ve seen it all before.
There’s got to be a better way to handle these things than the media going crazy and making every story a tale of the end of the world…
Amish…
This new job has a lot going for it, not the least of which is putting me 800-odd miles away from a certain batshit crazy senior leader. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few idiosyncrasies around here that I could do without. Until I’m self employed in a company of one, I suspect those are things I’ll just have to resolve to live with though. On balance, it’s been more than a fair trade.
There are a few things, however, that should be called out specifically. The first is that there isn’t a television anywhere in the building. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but I hadn’t realized how much I can come to rely on the quiet ranting of Fox News to help me tune out the random chatter that comes with life in a cube. The second, and perhaps more distressing is the distinct lack of cell service in the building. I’m fortunate to be by a window where I have just enough signal strength to punch out a text message or a tweet. Forget actually receiving a phone call or launching an app, though. This unhappy condition has the unfortunate side effect of leaving me largely at the mercy of whatever “fair use” I can manage with my desktop PC. Since that means I’m using Big Brother’s hardware, it feels like I might as well be Amish eight hours a day.
Friendly advice…
If you have a cube with a direct line of sight to the Executive Office of the UberBoss, it’s really best not to fall asleep watching the TV mounted to the wall across from you. It makes you look like a dumbass. Far more importantly, it makes me look like a dumbass.
Maybe I should just confiscate their desk chair tomorrow. It’s probably harder to fall asleep if you’re standing up… Though I’m not sure I’d be surprised to see it. I wonder if that’s even legal. I think that’ll be on the list of things to ask the lawyer tomorrow.
Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.
Sometimes things go right…
Hard as it is to believe, sometimes things actually go right. I had Direct TV installed this morning and the installer called about 15 minutes before he got here at 8:15 to let me know he was on his way. He did a quick survey of the project and then got to work. Of course it remains to be seen if the damned thing will actually work once the dish is mounted and all the TVs are plugged in. I’m sure that will be a follow-on post.
Stupid poetic justice…
So, next time I am bitching about not having anything to blog, someone please remind me to shut the hell up, please. This afternoon, I was expecting to take delivery of 42-inches of plasma goodness. The delivery guys were on target (yes, the Best Buy truck knows how to get to my house even though there are no maps with my neighborhood in them yet). The minute they started pulling it out of the box, I knew something wasn’t right… of course they were behind it, looking at the connections and hadn’t noticed what I was looking at yet… A simply “uhhhh… guys…” was enough to get their attention and draw it to a screen that wasn’t just cracked. It was shattered. Like a baseball through a window kind of shattered…
No problem they say, we’ll call the warehouse and swing by and pick up a new one and be back in an hour or so. They were even nice enough to call ahead and make sure a new set was waiting for them. An hour and a half later, they call back… There’s a problem. The set is out of stock. Now I know a little something about supply operations and being out of an advertised special the day before Thanksgiving is not a good thing to be, but I digress. To make what could become a long and painful rant slightly shorter, I ended up at the store with the “TV manager” trying to reach an agreement. After some extensive haggling and instance on recompense for my inconvenience, we agree that they will just give me the next higher model at no additional cost. Problem solved.
Yeah… not so much. Turns out this model was out of stock too. By this point I asked the guy to just go back to the warehouse and bring me a list of what they actually do have in stock and we’ll work from that. More haggling ensues, with corresponding increases in blood pressure and vocal volume. Finally, after two hours of dickering, finding out what they don’t have on hand, and my generally being obstinate until I got what I wanted, they agreed to a considerable upgrade. Mainly, I think, to get me out of the television section. Of course by now it’s after 7PM and they won’t be able to deliver it after the Thanksgiving weekend. Sigh. Let’s just say the Jeep has more cargo space than you think it does.
So, yes, my TV is here and working beautifully. Of course the stand I ordered with it still has to be delivered. In the grand scheme of life, it’s a minor detail, but you know how I hate it when things don’t go like clockwork.
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