Information Please

Just a short (maybe) little story tonight. We’re getting ready to leave for dinner and my phone rings and its Pop. I know this means something is wrong but hoping it is minor. The good news is that it does turn out to be a small and fixable problem. Those are my favorite kinds.

With his vision and memory, Pop has only a few channels memorized. One of those is for the station that typically carries the Tigers games. Baseball was the first sport I think he really followed and the Tigers have been his team for many years. They really haven’t had much success and this year they are just awful. When I was up last weekend, we watched three games and they lost all three and none of them were close. Still, he continues to root for them.

Anyway, the game this week was on Fox Sports 1 rather than the Detroit cable channel which typically has the games. That meant he couldn’t find it and he can’t see to read the TV guide that you can always dial up. So they call went out. This is my new job – finding sporting events for Pop.

Actually, I first had to determine where the game was because I dialed up MLB.com and could easily see that the Tigers were playing. He mentioned Fox Sports and I found some TV listings that confirmed it.

Then, the second problem was finding the right channel. He knew it was somewhere in the 700’s but scrolling through all the channels wasn’t going to work out. The good news is that I know the cable provider (same as ours) and you can work their website to find channel listings for any address.

Then I relayed the channel number to him and had to turn on our TV to get to FS1 on our side so I could confirm that he was on the right channel. If the game came up, this would be easy but if it was in commercial, he might not have the patience to sit through a commercial to know that he was on the right channel. Since he can’t see or hear that well, the volume gets cranked and I could hear it through the phone and confirmed that he had, indeed, found FS1 on his dial.

Since I didn’t get another phone call, I’m assuming he didn’t switch away and lose the game. Of course, the Tigers couldn’t pull out a win for all the work I did to find the game for him. But he at least had something to keep him entertained on a Saturday afternoon. I’m sure one of the cats was with him – there’s one that likes sitting with him.

I don’t know if there is a larger point. I mean it is funny that you probably don’t think much about changing channels on the TV. When I’ve watched TV, I’m a notorious browser so I spend a great deal of time going up and down the guide checking to see what’s on. But I’m just imagining what it would be like to not be able to do that. So I don’t mind being the go to TV guide.