Sotto voce

I'm being vewy vewy quiet just now. No, not hunting wabbits; just very scratchy after a morning spend yelling over the wind to try to make myself heard during this morning's pond study. I'm not especially wanting to lose my voice this early in the programming season, so quiet it is at the moment.

Headachy it is too at the moment, but that, unfortunately, is just a continuation of the past couple of days. My neck's been giving me some grief again, which is a little depressing since it'd been not too bad for the past few months.

Anyway.

I'm sure you'd all like to hear about my new cable box, right?

I have a new cable box.

I had to have a new cable box.

The company I'm with has decided to go entirely digital, so cable box it was.

Now, to be fair, they did offer the cable boxes and installations for free. I, however, had to go the not-free route because I'm a pretty heavy pvr user and my old unit (I think I was probably one of the first people in this city to have a pvr, so I do mean old unit) wouldn't have worked properly with the blasted cable box. So what does one do but bite the bullet, pay the *special discounted price* for the brand-new two-tuner pvr, and grumble under her breath about the stupid cable company anyway?

I actually do that last part quite a lot, but that's kind of beside the point.

The spiffy new cable box was installed yesterday. It... works. Well, what else is a person going to say about a cable box? It works, it does what it's supposed to, it'll show up in my credit card bill in a week or so. End of story, right?

Well, until quarter after twelve last night that's what I thought.

Something woke me up at quarter after twelve. I'm not sure what. All I really knew at the time was that the room seemed way too bright for quarter after twelve.

That's when I noticed that the television was on. The box was recording a late-night program, and there was the tv blaring away and me wondering what on earth for. Did Mr Installation Man couple the two units? Is the stupid thing going to turn on my television every time it turns itself on? Well, bloody hell, then.

I manually turned off the tv, then got to thinking that all I'd really done was put the two things out of sync. So what happens when the box turns itself off? Television on? Am I going to be annoyed by this game Every. Single. Night?

It wasn't until I woke up the next day that I realised that...

wait for it...

There was nothing wrong with the system. Nothing wrong with the box; nothing wrong with the tv. Something wrong with the operator, who'd turned off the box when she went to bed but hadn't remembered to turn off the television because it now goes straight to black when the cable box is off. The television was on the whole time, so of course it started making noise when the box turned itself on to record.

And yes, I'm an idiot.



An idiot who now has digital cable on a ten-year-old television, so I guess that's... something?

It's something, all right.