TV or not TV?
Jez and I just popped down to town for some cleaning stuff, and decided to go to PC World to buy an ink catridge. It’s a store which I totally shun, incidentally. I think the staff are generally stupid, the quality of service rotten, the products miserable and the whole place just stinks of the mediocrity of corporation. So there.
So I’m standing there in PC World gazing blankly at the ink cartridge boxes, wondering which of the strange numeric codes corresponds to the model of my printer (which has decided it needs to be filled with colour ink before it can print plain black text). And since it’s over a year since I’ve had to buy ink, I really have no idea which cartridge I need to get. A young man comes up to me and says very brightly:
"Hello, can I help you at all there?"
I am grateful to see him.
"Yes," I say, "I’m wondering which ink cartridge I need to get for my Epson. I know that the black ink has a teddy bear on the box but I don’t know which coloured cartridge I should buy, they all look the same."
"Ah…" he said. "Hmmm, you see, I don’t actually work for PC World."
"Whu-"
"But what I can offer you is a promotion I’m doing for users of digital TV! Do you have a digital TV?"
The young man shuffles his feet enthusiatically and is poised, pen in hand, ready to take our details. Jez and I, incredulous, say together:
"We don’t have a TV."
"What? You mean - "
"No, we don’t own a television. Goodbye."
Tonight, there’s a young salesman eating pizza in front of the TV, wearing the same bewildered expression he was when we left him, and wondering what on earth people who don’t have a television actually do all night!
*****
Jez and I simply decided that we didn’t have any use for a television. We watched it for about an hour once every month. For culture, we’re Radio 3 addicts and get all our news needs from the BBC website. We have lots of DVDs, hundreds of CDs between us, and we’re both complete bookworms. (In fact one of the best things about meeting him was all the new music and literature I discovered.)
So one day in July I logged onto facebook, and saw a notice saying something like "Jez is feeling liberated from the power of the gogglebox after giving away his telly on freecycle." And I worked it out and realised I hadn’t watched television since the first week in April.
I don’t want to sound like a highbrow culture snob here. I did enjoy certain TV shows (my favourites were Rick Stein and company) but I just couldn’t cope with the crappiness of the rest of it! We only had the standard five channels and had considered upgrading by getting freeview or whatever it’s called, but then we realised that actually, TV had just ceased to be a part of our lives.
Has anyone else had this epiphany?
