In Which I Wear the Foil Hat to Watch TV

The new channels are here. I celebrated last night by being very careful to watch programs that I hadn't been able to get before. Because I couldn't bear the thought of spending my first night with digital cable watching the ten o'clock news on a channel that I could get with rabbit ears.

I was a little worried about the installation appointment. Besides the fact that I don't like to have strangers in my space in general, my children, in anticipation of getting more channels, had doubled up on school work all week in order to spend the whole of Wednesday afternoon curdling their minds with vacuous children's programming.

I didn't mind that so much (since I was planning on spending a bit of time watching HGTV myself), but I didn't really want them to ANNOUNCE to the cable guy that they were homeschooled and were going to watch TV all day in celebration.

Just wait and let Mommy announce that on the Internet, okay kids?

But at the end of the appointment is when things went south. Because while Brian at the cable help desk was busy telling me that I sounded twenty-five on the phone, he was also telling me that I only needed one cable box. And while I couldn't understand how that could possibly work, I didn't want to strain my young-sounding voice by asking too many questions. Besides, I assumed that since he worked at the cable company help desk, surely he knew what he was talking about.

I'll pause while you laugh at my naivete.

It turns out that without the second cable box, we are unable to receive a very crucial cartoon channel on the downstairs TV. I took this very well, and was careful not to yell at the installer. Because working retail has made me very sympathetic to service people. If you yell at someone for something that they have no control over, they will go home and cry all night and eat lots of chocolate. Just like it's not fair to scream at the pharmacist because your insurance doesn't work, it wouldn't be fair to yell at the cable installer because Brian at the help desk is a silver-tongued flatterer.

I'm not sure what a service person would have to do to make me yell at them, but I think they would have to do something grievous, like spray paint obscenities on my van. And then I would probably ask them nicely not to do it again or I'll be forced to talk to their boss.

But by the end of the day, the nice local cable people had given me a new box. All I had to do was hook it up and call the 800 number to have the people at the help desk activate it. They also had to wipe out the previous owner's parental control PIN number. Since I can't remember my own PIN numbers, I certainly can't be expected to figure out someone else's PIN.

But now I'm a little freaked out about the fact that someone sitting in an office far away can reset the PIN numbers on a cable box in my family room. And even though I know that part of the problem is that I just finished reading 1984, I now remember that when I had a cable box back in days of old, I used to worry that it would be extremely easy for them to hide a camera in one of those things.

In other words, my paranoia goes way back.

Oh I kid. I'm not really that paranoid. Because everybody knows that they really watch you through your microwave.