This Is This

These days, everyone is different. Actually, wants something different for everyone one. Actually, these days, everyone is the same.

When I was a kid, you walked into someone’s house and the TV was over there and the stereo was over there. I’m talking 25 years ago, not ages. Twenty five years before that, if you walked into someone’s house, the TV was there and the stereo was - ok no stereos but you played your records over there.

But now you walk into someone’s house and you need a lesson from the occupant about how everything works.

“The TV is hooked up the DVD player through this box. If you want to watch a video, just turn in on and hit that button. Oh, and put it on channel ten. If you want to record anything it goes through the red box unless you’re taping satellite in which case come off channel ten and hit this button.”

“The TV and everything goes through the sound system. You can’t listen to the stereo and watch TV at the same time. If you want to listen to actual CDs, you have to turn the TV off. Except we don’t have CDs. Dock the i-pod into the TV and run that through the stereo.”

“The computer controls everything. Except the phone. If you want to use the phone you have to put the TV on channel ten and talk through that. Apart from long distance calls - they all go through the computer using this headset and instant messenger.”

Who would want to be a babysitter any more?

It used to be: “TV’s there, here’s the name of the restaurant, we’ll be back by ten.”

The amount of options and customisation makes me really anxious. It used to be that if your TV didn’t work, then it meant your TV needed fixing. Right now my TV is flickering when I play DVDs. It could be one of the two scart leads, or the scart splitter, or the DVD player, or any of the five sockets that the signal goes through to get to the TV. Or it could be that my TV needs fixing. But in order to establish if my TV needs fixing, I have to check if any of the leads are faulty and that means bypassing everything bit by bit, because the TV repair guy will tell me: “It could be your lead or your splitter.”

I feel like sending everything back, every component and appliance and giving them all each other’s numbers and writing a stern letter to each, saying: “Well, something’s fucked. You guys sort it out and get back to me.”

Last weekend my dad’s broadband connection went on the fritz. It could have been a phone line problem, an ISP problem, a computer problem, a cable problem, a modem problem or a wireless router problem. So again with the bypassing diagnosis, which took nearly an hour of calls and uninstalls and bypasses and reinstalls to discover that, yep, it was a phone line problem.

Life’s not easier, it’s just that there is more choice.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 8:51 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.