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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

digital is not better

so we have all become digitized. crazy progress. right? except for my tv. my poor beleagured tv that the kids know how to turn on, so i can no longer tell them its 'broken'. its not that its old, its that the poor tv had 'basic' cable, which garnered us enough to get free pbs sprout shows when we wanted, like sesame street and roary the racing car, and the beloved fireman sam, without having to wait til the designated hours... and guess what was no longer free when we all went digital? Can you explain to me how public broadcasting can not be free? the lady on the Cox phoneline (i know, i can't believe they've kept that name!) COX phoneline (repetitions intentional) kept saying,literally... 'well, it is FREE, as long as you are a subscriber'. I pointeed out the dichotomy but she just repeated the above sentence. Thank you for using COX. SO. now we have 5000 channels in an attempt to make my life easier, and goddamn it, I cannot get PBS sprout unless I get 5000 more. seriously. We are making do with the Jonas brothers, of whom I have very serious doubts. I cannot stand how sick I feel when the tv is on too much, I think it releases some kind of stupid after an hour or so... spritzer for the damned.

The real issue I have is with my hearing aide. I know it is not a universally interesting subject but they used to be all analog, with cute little volume control knobs and great hinged doors and guess what? nobody makes them like that anymore... so i hear. the extremely expensive ($2K each!) digital hearing aides do not let you control the volume. they 'do' it for you, adjusting, as they say, to the environment... so lets imagine... you walk into a crowded preschool classroom and the hearing aide automatically reduces the amount of sound it lets in, so the physical reality is that you walk into a wonderfully dynamic romper room and are suddenly deafened and when the teacher talks to you, you have to lean in, squint your eyes and beg forgiveness from God for whatever it is you did in your last life... THANK YOU PROGRESS.This is my old analog, which I currently wear. The door is not supposed to come off, thats the battery thing/door there on the table. If you look, you can actually see through the backside of the plastic, under the 'hinge'metal road thing which has been superglued into place. And of course, the wonderful volume knob, which lets me hear the teachers' comments but lets me 'just say no' to anything coming from the wiggles.
I'm not sure people are supposed to mcguyver hearing aides. I'm really not.
here comes the new one: paid for with a loan from my parents... which I will not wear, but which looks real pretty... and because I spend so much time with a four year old who really thinks he knows everything ... it looks like someone in the Clone Wars... useless. and all i've got left if my little pretty goes awry. . .

3 comments:

urban craft said...

wow I have always wondered how those things work. I always wanted one of those 2 way systems earpieces like in Mission Impossible, where you could talk to someone else and they can hear and reply back to you from the other side of some crowded stadium. But I hear you about tv. We cancelled cable all together and let the boy watch some things on the computer when he's not watching public television (we actually get 3 PBS stations via attenna but only 1 with cable, not counting sprouts.) But even then, he's always trying to get on the computer. So, it never ends.

this new place said...

mine are very similar to yours! (you did write them off on your taxes, right? my insurance didn't pay for them, but was able to write them off) Mine have the tiny button that I push, one beep and it is low, keeping sound slightly higher but on the low side for loud places...then the two beeps that has a tune which is for usual normal stuff...and then thetwo right after the other that turns everything on high. Nothing worse though, no matter what we do, than hearing the fridge run and the clocks tick.

this new place said...

btw, I totally use closed captioning on my tv, I still have the volume up though. My guy loves cc too because regardless of your hearing, it's easy to miss stuff!