My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Picture Imperfect

The satellite dish was Ed’s idea. My husband wanted to be able to watch all 162 Giants games, and for this, he said, he needs a special sports channel. I think what he needs is a special sports therapist, but satellite TV is cheaper, and I gave in. So now, in order for Ed to watch one channel, we’d be paying for 843. I had my work cut out for me.

I sat down with our new baguette-size remote, and pressed On. Right away, Ed began talking, though the TV set sat mute. He explained there were now four separate button-pushes involved in turning on the TV. As he demonstrated, the TV came on. It was a Philippine station, and a man was speaking in Tagalog about his washing machine. “You go Satellite, TV, On, Satellite,” Ed was saying. “Get it? For Off, it’s Off, TV, Off.” I got it the way I get Tagalog washing-machine ads. I muted Ed and called the help line.

“You shouldn’t have to push all those buttons,” said the Help woman.

I relayed this to Ed, but he didn’t hear me, engrossed as he was in Antiques Roadshow. A man had lugged in an old museum case of taxidermied birds, no doubt to make room for his new giant remote and satellite receiver, and was showing it to a British chap with a pasted-on smile. “You’ve got a fantastic array of birds here, don’t you?”

I turned back to my pal on the other end of the phone, who was telling me that I was going to have to reprogram my remote. This is like being told that in order to shave a few minutes off your walk to work, you were going to have to have your legs removed and sewn on in a new position, which, as it happened, they were doing on the surgery channel at that moment.

Ed eventually found his sports channel. An Indianapolis 500 winner was philosophizing about his career, which racecar drivers maybe shouldn’t do: “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes the bug.”

“Now, to reprogram your remote, you take out the batteries and press the ‘1’ button for 60 seconds,” the Help woman—clearly the windshield here—was saying. “Then put the batteries back and hold down the ‘TV’ button at the same time as you enter the TV brand code, which you can look up in your manual.” It was going to require six arms, minimum, which the surgeons of Channel 89 could no doubt arrange.

I became intrigued with a button labeled Fetch, no doubt the source of many a humorous exchange between remote-holding, sandwich-wanting husbands and their wives. The feature would allow Ed to input a keyword, such as “Giants,” or “baseball,” or “big, fat waste of time” and, with the press of a button (or 18 buttons), fetch channels that matched. Ed entered “Giants,” and the TV reported that they were appearing on Channel 573. He pressed Fetch. The TV gamely fetched a blank channel.

As it turns out, we only get about 225 of 843 channels, the rest appearing as blank screens, requiring the viewer to scroll endlessly—effectively ruining the all-American channel-surfing experience.

I called the Help woman back, demanding to know how to get rid of the blank stations. She asked if I’d looked in my User’s Guide. I didn’t like where this was heading. If I wanted to read and exercise comprehension skills, I wouldn’t be watching television.

In no time at all, though, I was surfing gleefully. I had wanted to hate satellite TV, but it’s so wonderfully, derangedly entertaining. Here was Barney Rubble ordering chopped pterodactyl livers. Here was the incredible Flat Hose, attaching easily to any faucet!

There was Gene Rayburn on the Game Show Channel, introducing a contestant with “a hobby of opera and swimming,” which one dearly hopes are not practiced simultaneously. I smiled to myself, like the British chap from Antiques Roadshow. “You’ve got a fantastic array of channels here, don’t you?”