That the digital revolution has turned us all into tyrannized suckers became apparent on the day my wife decided we needed a personal video recorder.
Her reasoning was simple. Our daughters, when tired, tended to plop themselves in front of the television and watch whatever drivel happened to be on. With a PVR, we could amass a library of quality programming, much of it educational in gloss, and save our children from sitting through endless reruns of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. It sounded reasonable to me.
Off I went to an audio store, where I picked out a PVR. I also bought a high-definition television set, my understanding being that the two instruments were like the port and Stilton of the audio-visual world, one never quite shining without the other.
It was at this point that I learned a germane fact about modern television equipment: It is so unduly complex that the average consumer cannot actually put it together.
Two days later, a pair of installers came to my house, yanked gadgets out of boxes, snapped wires into place, fiddled with settings and generally belaboured the wonders of the PVR revolution. “Remember the old days?” said one of them, an older man who had a habit of pointing in the direction of my TV while he spoke. “Remember how if you decided you wanted to make a sandwich you had to wait until an ad came on? Well no more! Just press pause and it doesn’t matter how long you need to make that sandwich!”
Shortly after they left, however, I noticed the audio coming from my old DVD player was extremely low. To counteract this, I had to increase the volume perilously close to maximum, achieving a phenomenon whereby all the characters were hollering at one another and I still couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I called the store, and they sent over a technician named Edward to look at the problem. After a flurry of tinkering, he told me that somehow, in the few minutes that had transpired between the dismantling of my old system and the setting up of my new one, my DVD player had managed to break itself. Of this, he was adamant: “You need a new player. I suggest Blu-ray.”
I went back to the store and bought a Blu-ray player without really understanding what a Blu-ray player is, a situation that has not changed in the interim.
Naively, I tried to hook it up myself, an exercise requiring three lost days that I prefer not to think about. (“Have you highlighted a dedicated channel in your input select window?” a technical support adviser asked, more than a little testily, over the phone. I confessed that I had not.)
Yet no sooner did I get the damn thing to work when I discovered the low audio problem persisted. I went back to the store and pleaded my case. After listening sympathetically, the floor manager promised to dispatch their best technician, a person whom he admiringly referred to as their “top gun.”
Five days later, Jordan came. He was about 28, and he looked a little like a young Russell Crowe, albeit covered in tattoos. He adjusted more settings, played with a few buried menus that only the most enlightened of technicians have access to and gave me a few tips. He then admitted that, bottom line, DVDs just play low, particularly on newer televisions.
I thanked him, though not without mentioning that this experience was beginning to sour my impression of digital technology.
“Oh I agree totally,” he said. “At home, I only listen to music on a turntable. I don’t even have cable on my TV set.”
Now, throughout all this, the wire connecting my Blu-ray player to my TV – for those keeping score it’s called an HDMI – had been a fraction too short. I went back to the shop again to buy a longer one. Fittingly, the person who assisted me was the same salesman who had sold me the TV and PVR. As I waited to pay for the cable, I finally vented.
“You know, I’ve spent all this money, and have suffered weeks of aggravation, and for what? I’ve got a system that now requires four – yes four – remote controls to operate, meaning that every time my kids try to use it they accidentally press a wrong button and the whole thing shuts itself down like HAL at the end of Space Odyssey. The audio is terrible, and since the channels I watch aren’t broadcast in high-definition they actually look worse than they did with my old television set. Did it ever occur to you that there’s a reason you’ve got so many turntables and tube amplifiers in your showroom? Could it be that people are so alienated by digital technology they’re rebelling against it by buying that stuff?”
At this point, I noticed my money had been sitting on the counter for some time, and the salesperson was staring blankly at the screen in front of him. I had to ask: “You’ve got a problem with your computer don’t you?”
“We had a new system installed,” he said, “and since then we’ve been experiencing a few glitches.”
We stood looking at one another, one man revelling in the irony of it all, and one entirely oblivious. It was the latter who finally said: “It shouldn’t be too much longer.”
Robert Hough lives in Toronto and is the author, most recently, of The Culprits.
