Interruption

 What if there was no cable TV?

I know. It sounds like a bad dream, but it happened to me. For real. 

There I was, minding my own business, enjoying the morning after my sixty-fourth birthday when I made the somewhat mindless gesture of turning on the television to keep me company while I got ready to continue my day. When I was greeted by a message on the screen that read, "This channel is unavailable. V58." A chill ran down my spine as I began to wrestle with the vision of hours of my summer vacation slipping away as I dealt with tech support issues. 

I have lived through these trials before. Many were the times I have spent dangling on a telephone line as someone from a distant locale attempted to unscramble the wires that bring my dopamine release system. Attempting to head this fate off at the pass, I restarted all the machines that are responsible for bringing video entertainment in to my home. There was a message on our Tivo screen that let us know that some elements would be eliminated soon from our service, and this made me fret that our tried and true TV digester was somehow the problem. I fought off the idea of a world without a digital video recorder. As much as I comprehend a future in which all video is on demand and storing things on a magnetic disc is so incredibly 1997 that I wrestled briefly with the thought of ditching this piece of hardware for good. 

Only briefly.

Because when I found that our Internet connection was still happy and viable, I checked for outages in my area that might be affecting my level of contentment. The customer service lines were no help, nor was the app that had so helpfully reminded me earlier that day about their gratitude for my regularly scheduled payment of far too much money to not have to think about what happens when I turned on my television. 

Historical perspective: I can remember having to tune in stations that came through the air like I was operating a shortwave radio. Rabbit ears enhanced with strips of tin foil are a part of my memories. I can remember being offered the option of watching upstairs on the black and white TV that could be rolled into the kitchen or downstairs on trays placed around the color set. I remember when stations would end their broadcast day and for several hours in the middle of the night there would be no television. 

No television? 

Please. I'm old. I can't take that kind of threat. 

By the time lunch was finished and I had begun making plans for the rest of the day without anything to watch, service had been restored. Reruns and news shows and movies and channels that I continue to pay for without ever looking at were once again tumbling into my living room. And bedroom. 

And into my full heart. 

What a ridiculous story.