Dan’s Papers October 29, 2010 danshamptons.com Page 14
Radio Broadcasting
(continued from page 11)
turn it on in the middle, there will be a brief moment when it is turned on in real time before I can get around to hitting the buttons to get the recorded game to start at the beginning. If I happen to look up when I first sit down, it is possible I can accidentally peek at the screen and see the score. Knowing the score will take all the drama out of things. The work-around is this. You sit down, press ON on the remote, and then very quickly press the down arrow on the channel selector. That way when the screen lights up a few seconds later, you are watching the channel that is just adjacent to the one where the game is. You have beaten the system. You live in ignorant bliss. And you have the remote fully in your control, which is why they call it that. That is not what happened when I sat down this time, however. I turned the TV on with the remote, fiddled to find the down arrow, and somehow must have hit some other button. In doing so, I seemed to have disabled the remote. Nothing worked. No matter what button I pressed, C. C. Sabathia was still on my screen pitching to a Texas batter in real time, which was the sixth inning. The score was Yankees 5, Texas 1. The workaround had failed. Yaaaah. Worse, I couldn’t do anything, and the screen was now frozen. The TV was trash. My friends were coming in two hours. If I could not fix this, I would have a glum, disastrous assemblage of baseball fans wishing to kill me. I thought—maybe there is just something
wrong with the remote. Maybe it needs new batteries. I changed them. It did not help. That meant that the problem was with the TV box. So I went back to the TV room and tried to turn it off and on. It would not turn off. This meant I would have to call my provider, which is DirecTV. (Not Cablevision.) And that is where I had the most extraordinary experience with a provider I have ever had over a phone. We talked for a while. I was dealing with a guy who was at a DirecTV office in Harrisburg, PA. He said his name was John and what was mine. I told him Dan. In short order, he came to the same conclusion I had, that there had been something in the software that got tangled up in the TV box freezing it in this position. He also told me that if I was recording I could not turn off the TV box by pressing the power button. That was normal. “Open the little door on the front,” he said, “and you will see a little red button. Press that. It will reset the box.” I did so, and the TV box turned itself off. “Now press ON on the remote,” he told me. I pressed ON and sure enough, the box turned itself back on. After 10 seconds, the TV screen came on, but it was not the game. It was a message. PLEASE WAIT… it said. “It’s going to restore itself,” the man said. “It will take awhile.” Now it read SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL. I told him that.
“Oh, it will take about 10 minutes. Has to go through the whole thing. But I’ll hang out with you to make sure it works.” “Okay,” I said. We waited in silence for about 60 seconds. “What’s it doing now?” he asked. “It still says SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL,” I said. “You know, I was watching the Yankee game.” “Yeah,” he said. “If Texas wins this it’s all over. If not, it’s back home to Dallas. Well, now it’s 5 to 2.” “You’re watching this?” “Yeah. We have a TV on, of course. Has to be on something.” “What happened?” “Texas got a run. They have two runners on.” I started thinking. Here I am, paying DirecTV to watch this game. But I can’t see it. But he can. But then he was thinking the same thing. “Count’s 0 and 2,” he said. “What bases?” “First and third. What does your TV say?” “Says FINDING PROGRAM INFORMATION.” “Very normal. Want me to be a radio announcer?” “What?” “I could announce the game for you if you want. Part of the fine DirecTV service.” “You would do that?” (continued on page 22)
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