For those old enough to remember the early days of television in Newfoundland there was a brilliant promo for what was then CJON-TV. It said that CJON was “Your Window on the World”. It was very true. Television was, and is, a technological social force without equal in the world. It changed everything. We have come to a place where it is hard to imagine there not being television.
The world into which I was born in 1946 was a world without television. The first TV exposure for me in 1956 was standing outside the Great Eastern Oil building on Water Street and watching, along with a group of Portuguese fishermen from the White Fleet, the flickering images of a Fleetwood television that Great Eastern had placed in their showroom window. It was magic. I would watch for hours and eventually make my way back up the hill in the west end to our house through some rough streets.
Now I thought about the Great Eastern Oil television experience the other day. The occasion was when one Saturday morning I flicked on one of four televisions in our house. I wanted a dose of CNN with my morning coffee. There was no CNN. In fact, there was no cable signal at all to wink back at me. It was gone. It wasn’t just the absence of CNN. There were no channels of any kind being received. I also found in a hurry when I tried to call the cable provider that I also had no house telephone and no home security. There was also no internet. It was all linked together and it was missing. Can you imagine? Oh, the humanity!
Eventually, I used my cell phone to call the cable guys for what I thought would be a quick fix. It wasn’t. The repair service was in Toronto or Sri Lanka. I’ll never know. The three people I spoke with had accents and I, of course, had a west end St. John’s accent. The cable people tried resetting everything and guiding me through the process of routers and cable boxes and plugs but it just didn’t work. They then scheduled a visit from the local technician. The problem is that this was a Saturday morning on a long holiday weekend. My repair was set for TUESDAY of next week. Stretched out before me was all day Saturday and all-day Sunday and all-day Monday with no TV, no internet connection, no security, no house phone. My working cell phone was the only connection in our home with the civilized world. It was a grim prospect that grew darker as the hours wore on.
It wasn’t too bad in the daylight hours. On Saturday I did miss news and Notre Dame football and Manchester United in the EPL, but I had things to do. As darkness closed in, I became a bit antsy’. I eventually hooked up my DVD player to the TV but all I had was a Mr. Bean disk, a copy of the movie Rudy and an old copy of Dumb and Dumber my three boys watched when they were children. At least it was something to kill a bit of time. In a way it did relieve me of my panic. Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan was right. The media really IS the message. It didn’t really matter what I watched as long as I WATCHED. It is the watching that provided satisfaction and not the content. I got through the night.
The next morning, which was Sunday, I had to work at NTV so while I was getting ready, I put Mr. Bean on again. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you do search in vain for logic in the human heart and behavior patterns. I returned to my “manor” eventually after work and was prepared for another night of Mr. Bean and Rudy. I had already decided to pass on Dumb and Dumber. Wife met me at the door to tell me we now had internet restored and the phones had come back up. What manner of sorcery is this? She said she had found two plugs out of the system. The culprit was the frighteningly automatic vacuum that sometimes glides around our floors and frightens the life out of our two cats.
Within an hour the upstairs television was back on and a call to the provider resulted in them re-booting our whole system in all its aspects. I was back in business. I was saved.
The lessons learned? I am hopelessly hooked on television. I have made a nice living in the TV business, and I obviously find great comfort in having it and its many channels morning, noon, and night. I am lost without television. On the day I spent without it I would gladly have gone down to the Great Eastern Oil and watched through the window if they were still in business.
Everything is back to normal now, but I swear that I’ll never watch Mr. Bean again. Think about my experience. I’ll wager most of you in similar circumstances would be looking for the Great Eastern Oil window too.
You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]