TV FRUSTRATION

TV FRUSTRATION

(I need the home field advantage)

TV today is great.  With cable or satellite you can get over 300 channels not counting premium stations.  In the good old days we only had seven stations, and that was including PBS which had nothing but crap that only smart people could watch.

We had very little to choose from with seven stations, however you could flip through all seven in seconds.  Flipping through 300 stations takes forever which is why most systems have one channel which speed flips through multiple stations, or a system which allows you to watch one station while you flip through the whole spectrum of channels.  All of this works quite well at home where you know immediately where to find all your favorite channels.   When you are away TV can be incredibly frustrating.  When you are away, you lose the home field advantage.

When I Baby-sit for my grandchildren in Allentown, Pa., I lose the home field advantage.   My son’s cable system offers no station which flips through all channels.  There is no system to watch one show while you flip.  There is no rhyme or reason for the channel placement.  Even the big four, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX are all over the dial (the dial is what we used to use to tune into a station.  Tuning is what you had to do when you found your station because stations did not always…..HELL GIYP if you really care.)
To add frustration on Matt’s TV system, there are decimal stations, almost all of which have no programming.  It takes about eight seconds to determine that the station is not used.   Channel 30 to 31 goes from 30.1, 30.2, 30.3 etc. until reaching channel 31.  It takes 1 minute and 20 seconds to find out that from 30-31 there are no shows!  This also goes for 40-41, 82-83, and 98-99.

The Station’s identifier will not show during commercials, so to identify a station often takes waiting 4-8 minutes for the show to begin.  If you pass a station that you are looking for during commercials it takes about 35 minutes to surf your way back.
Last night at nine o’clock I wanted to watch the finale of “Americas Got Talent” on NBC.  My son and daughter-in-law were asleep so I was on my own to find NBC.  Channel 10 was NBC.  Every time I surfed to channel 10 it was during commercial.  I would wait 4 minutes, get frustrated and begin to surf again.  I surfed all 300+ stations twice before I found that NBC was on channel 10.  I found three different channels that had CBS, two that had ABC four had FOX and two different channels had the History Channel.  The freaking HISTORY channel for crap sake but I couldn’t find NBC until after ten o’clock and the “AGT” finale was over.

I could have Googled the cable system and got an on-line listing of all the stations, but wait, my laptop does not connect to his wireless network; that’s another story.

I love TV, but I need the home field advantage.