Here's how lame my husband and I are. We don't know jack about our TV. The Dalai Lama knows more about television technology than we do. Also the little French Catholic school girl who skips past my house every morning, as well as her fictional equivalent, Madeline.
My husband is one bored vacation day away from being a computer evil-genius. He knows more about computers and innately senses what they can do before the technological advances even take place. Give him a couple spare hours with nothing better to do and he could do some damage to airline flight schedules, I'm telling you. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is, so I'll say that he may or may not have hacked into the editors' private messaging system when he was a newspaper intern. He has outfitted us with Macs and related Apple products in every room and he understands how all of them work. But the only TV we're comfortable with is the one from the '90s, so it may as well be made of slate and iron ore.
"How do you work this thing?" he fiddled with one of four remotes we have for our living room TV. It was the one that the Comcast guy gave to us when he came out to help us deal with our anxiety when we moved the TV from the corner table up 16 inches to a wall mount. The other three remotes, I suspect, are for old TVs that we don't have anymore, and the green one might be a Nintendo 64 controller.
"I don't know," I said. "Can we please just watch YouTube videos of kittens on the laptop?"
Apple, it seems, has ruined us, with that intuitive-driven odorless gas that's been piped into our home since our kid's first iPod. We no longer know how to read instruction manuals. I'm barely literate, at this point, but I find some success with hitting buttons and keys and swiping my finger randomly across smooth surfaces to get things done.
Our TV, however, is not spitting out reward pellets for just pushing random buttons.
"What the hell. Shit. Damn."
"Sometimes if you push SLEEP and then INFO three times, quickly followed by reinserting the batteries and shaking it, Law and Order SVU will come on," I told him. "But to get HGTV, you might have to involve the red P.SIZE button and the green STILL button, which sound dangerous and permanent."
"This from the woman who regularly smacked the side of the TV," my husband said.
"That used to work," I muttered. "Simpler, happier times . . ."
When the Comcast guy was here, I vaguely remember him mentioning that cable TV is all over itself with high-tech features now. That we were sadly living in the dark ages with our reliance on Big Bang Theory reruns every doggone night. That the ComcaXfinitian are leading the way with blah blah blahblah. I stopped listening and went to look for an aspirin. I honestly had my doubts that just because the TV was mounted on the wall that I was going to watch it any more frequently than I had.
So imagine my surprise nine months later when I find out that the cable guy was right. It took me a while, but I did intuitively figure out that I can access cable TV on the Internet on my laptop, watch old previously aired shows like my TiVo-DVR-braggy friends, and watch live TV as it's happening. Also, I can tap into Xfinity's wireless when I'm out and about, because I'm a customer. Apparently you don't have to be a very smart or knowledgeable customer to get these benefits. We stupid ones are eligible too. Not only that - and this might be a glitch, so don't tell anyone - but on my laptop I can get HBO, a bunch of premium channels that we don't pay for, and porn.
"What?" my husband stops mid-flip.
"Yeah. Just click COMMAND, CONTROL and then slowly dim the screen. Putting some John Legend on iTunes doesn't hurt either. Remember, I said this is easy, not necessarily as easy as Apple. She's getting a reputation."
