You know how you sometimes suspect that watering the lawn or washing your car are the surest way to guarantee rain? By that same logic, I went to my local Radio Shack to buy a TV antenna on Monday so that I could at least watch something on one of my four large screen television sets.
I got the thing home and hooked it up. Someday if you're looking for some simple minded fun try balancing a set of rabbit ears on top of a flat screen television. Oh the laughs I had with that one. Sure enough I could watch two of my local four channels. As close as I could tell, one of them is the Caribbean Talk Show Channel... I must have spent two maybe three seconds watching that one... and the other is the American Reruns Channel. The day I was watching, it featured House reruns.
By Wednesday the cable company had discovered that I was now able to enjoy CTSC without their assistance so they called to tell me that the cable guy would be there on Thursday morning.
Was this a source of great joy? Well, no actually. You see I was scheduled to make a presentation on Thursday at 11:00 and by the power of the elder gods and Murphy that meant the cable guy would call at 10:45. And he did. I could either have to forego television for another 82,000 weeks or postpone my presentation.
I delayed my presentation and rushed back to the apartment. I don't think the cable guy has ever had a customer help him before but between the two of us, we managed to have everything installed in about ten minutes. Instead of having four televisions with four non-functioning cable boxes, I now have four televisions with two functioning cable boxes and four non functioning cable boxes. Try as I might, I could not get the guy to take the old equipment. According to him, the cable company wants me to bring them into their office and he couldn't do it. "And what would be my motivation for doing that?" I asked. "Just leave them in the apartment," he replied.
You have to love bureaucracy in all its wonderful forms.
Back to the office only ten minutes late for my presentation... the others were eating their lunches which consisted of roti... a roti is a buritto made with potatoes and assorted other fillings using a tortilla about the size of a table cloth made out of something yellow... and some of the local soda pops... which have some pretty strange flavors available like banana, pear and my personal favorite, sorrel.
So everything turned out fine, except I have a large pile of cable equipment... anyone wishing to purchase nonfunctional equipment feel free to contact me... and I have channels.
Lord, do I have channels. I have at least a couple hundred channels. I have American Channels, British Channels, American Channels in Spanish (Animal Planet is only available here in Spanish). I have Hindi channels (including the best of Bollywood Channel), Chinese channels, German channels, French channels, and channels in languages I'm not even sure what they are. I think I might have some Arabic language channels and perhaps one in Korean.
Not that I can actually find anything to watch.
I think I'll go back to trying to figure out what sorrel is and why someone thinks it would be a good flavor for a soft drink.
