I used to love our Valparaiso cable TV. It cost less than any other service and gave us many channels to choose from. Then, about a year ago, they “upgraded” the system to a streaming service. Now, we can rarely watch an entire episode of Wheel of Fortune (or any other show, for that matter) without the system freezing, buffering, or flashing the dreaded message, “This channel can’t be accessed now. Try again later.” It usually happens at the worst moment, like in the bonus round when the puzzle is about to be revealed. This aggravating system makes me long for the good old days when all we had to do to fix a television problem was wrap aluminum foil around the rabbit-eared antenna.

For months, I have meant to call City Hall and complain, but I always seem to remember only when it’s too late—City Hall is closed, and my favorite shows are frozen in midair. When I finally remembered to call during the day, I got routed to someone’s voicemail, who, of course, never called me back.

Then, the other day, I hit pay dirt. I got through to a nice young man who apologized profusely for the problems we’ve been having and then made the mistake of going into a long dissertation on all the technological reasons for why our TV service was acting up. He used words like “streaming service,” “bandwidth,” and “clearing cache,” which mean absolutely nothing to my old dinosaur brain.

Okay, I understand streaming, sort of. It’s video delivered over the internet, which by simple definition translates into “something is bound to mess up.” And I understand that more bandwidth is good and less bandwidth is bad. But beyond that, the poor guy might have been speaking Chinese for all I understood. I wanted to save him the breath and just say I didn’t care WHY. I just wanted him to make my TV service work.

He then offered me two options. He could send out a technician, or he could talk me through some troubleshooting steps.

“You’d better send someone out,” I told him. “I guarantee I will not understand anything you tell me and will only make things worse.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” he assured me. (He was probably a tech-savvy millennial for which all things technical are easy.) “Are you at home?”

At this point, I should have lied and said no, but I did what I’ve done a thousand times with technology and thought perhaps, with his help, I actually COULD accomplish something. (Like THIS time would be any different.) So, I foolishly admitted I was home, but I’d still rather someone come out.
“But I can help you get the most out of your system,” he argued. The poor guy obviously didn’t realize who he was talking to.

I snorted. “Sure, give it your best shot,” I almost said, but held my tongue.

“Okay, do you have Roku or Amazon Fire?” he asked.

Ooh! Ooh! I knew this! “Roku,” I answered, proud of myself.

“Okay, great. Do you have the black Roku box?”

“Yes,” I said, also proud of myself. “Except it’s white and says “Net Gear.”

“Um, that’s your modem, ma’am,” he replied. “Do you see a black box?”

I looked under the TV, saw something black, and got excited. “This might be it!” I pulled the object out only to discover it was an old, dusty VCR tape. “No, that’s not it. I don’t see a box.”

“Okay, let’s try something else. Find the Roku connector on your menu.”

Menu? “Do you mean the Roku channel?” I asked, growing more confused. I almost asked him to speak English.

“No, it’s a blue square and should have an arrow on the top.”

“No, I don’t have anything like that. Look, could you just send someone out?”

“Oh,” he said, “I think I see part of your problem. Your modem is showing only one line upstream. You should have four.”

Well! That certainly clears everything up. NOT! Although, I gather, in this case, four is better than one, even if I don’t have a clue what it means.

“Okay, can you fix it and send someone out to take care of the rest?” I asked.

He finally gave in and set up an appointment for a technician to come to the house and clear my cache. I had no idea I had a cache or that it needed to be cleared. He went on to tell me what else the technician would do, but we were back to Chinese again.

I thanked the nice young man for all the time he had spent trying to educate me. “Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Could you have the technician bring a rabbit-eared antenna and some aluminum foil?”