Tarkblog

If you watch much television, surely at somepoint you’ve contemplated between a mini-dish or cable. For some people, cable isn’t an option due to their location. For others, a dish is a hassle. Either way, those are generally the two choices when it comes to television options.

About 10-15 years ago, after my grandparents officially retired and started spending more time in their respective houses (they own a vacation home in Mexico), they broke down and bought a satellite dish. Prior to this they were at the mercy of the “local channels”, which didn’t provide much CNN like news coverage in the middle of the afternoon — prime naptaking-in-the-lazyboy-while-the-TV-is-on time.

This was back in the time before minidishes, so they got the bigass style dish. It was expensive, but they can afford it, and decided to splurge and buy it. They also had one installed at their Mexico house.

Now, one thing about this style of dish is that it is aimed at a satellite and picks up some number of channels (24 I think). But there are multiple satellite available, and you can rotate the dish to point to different ones. This requires a lot of button pushing and selecting of which satellite you want, then choosing the channel on that satellite.

This meant that your channel lineup was a big GRID, consisting of picking a satellite then a channel. Now, it’s not like you can just say “I want to watch Golden Girls on Lifetime” and do the old “G3 satellite, channel 10″. No, this is because Lifetime broadcasts on three different satellites three different feeds. You may only be able to pick up the east coast feed during certain portions of the day, after which some other company leases the time on that satellite channel and you have to switch over somewhere else.

Needless to say, it is a huge pain in the ass. This is why the minidish came about - to make the whole thing easier.

However, my grandparents have refused to switch over to a minidish. They still use the same satellite system, albiet they end up getting a new control box every couple of years because inevitably one of the two they own breaks.

They just got back from Mexico this past Monday, and came home to a broken dish box. So they got a new one called “4DTV”.

On Sunday, I wanted to look at the weather channel to see the radar for some incoming storms, because the wife and I had to drive home and didn’t want to get caught in nasty storms. I asked my grandpa, who told me he had no idea how to use the TV. I asked my grandma, and she went in to show me. She turned it on, got the box remote, went into the “satellite selection mode” and wanted to choose “F3″. But there was no “F3″. Then she got mad, because she had spent a couple of hours programming in all of the satellite information into the box over the past few days…only to miss F3 - which has the weather channel on it. So we couldn’t watch it, because she didn’t know how to do the programming without the book, and I wasn’t about to touch their satellite box for fear of setting it up intuitively…something they probably wouldn’t figure out.

So I did what I always do…I suggested they just by a bleeping minidish and be done with it. Nope, that won’t do. You know why?:

“We don’t need all of those channels”.

No, they pay 40 or 50 dollars a month for 20 or so stations that take about 3 minutes a piece to switch between. They could pay 40 dollars a month for 120 channels which would limit their frustration, but the thought of not being wasteful is so ingrained into them that they can’t fathom paying for channels they don’t use.

Very frustrating, though fun to observe from a detached perspective.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 8:15 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.