A few months ago I decided to conduct an experiment, because I was coming off a string of failed relationships, and when it gets that bad, you’re supposed to drown your sorrows in milkshakes, GOOBERS-brand goobersâ„¢, and TV. (Note: I just upgraded WordPress and as far as I can tell, the major feature they added was the inability for me to inline pictures with the GUI. So I assume that this recent WordPress update will either turn the â„¢ into the aggravating diamond character that’s poxed-up my older articles, or that using a â„¢ will cause a worldwide server meltdown that makes Chernobyl look like a poorly-managed EZ-Bake.)
The experiment was just me leaving my Directv unit on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I tuned it to ESPN and left it there. However, I turned the television itself off. I wasn’t raised this way. I was raised to turn the TV and cable box, both, off. Maybe you weren’t, but there are multiple males in my family who won’t give their names to a computer and childhood habits are hard to break. The unit was on, but the television was off, as it had been that way since the end of the regular NFL season. (I watched both playoff games and the Super Bowl in HD venues, High Definition venues as in, NOTE TO THIEVES, not in my actual goddamn home.)
Well, it finally paid off. I got a notice from Nielsen that they want me to be one of them. I had my suspicions, my paranoid suspicions, that Directv was happily broadcasting my viewing habits to them, because they’re all whores. Doesn’t matter, Nielsen wants me, or more specifically, my family. My family that hasn’t once stopped viewing television since late December, as far as they know. My “family,” that, strictly speaking, kills buggies, eats mushy brown pud and slinks about everywhere. They also constantly put their little paws in the coin return slots of my arcade games, looking for quarters, because they don’t have any money and they reject their poverty.
I’m not sure what channel is going to be the one left on continually when I’m finally accepted as a real Nielsen family. I’m enjoying the power, as it’s the only power in my miserable life at the moment. It probably won’t be ESPN because Chris Berman seems like an enormous cocksucker, and he’s almost always on, from what I understand, just being a pattern of bald and ruining everything. I don’t know what channel Breaking Bad is on, because I’ve been stealing it from the Internet, but that might be a good choice. I also liked the one show where a bunch of guys go on a fishing boat and enslave forty-thousand tons of fresh crab. That was a good one.
Sorry, I don’t have a decent ending to this. Aardvark is counting down his favorite games in the forum, though.
Rob O'Hara
We got picked to do this once, although at the time we had analog cable so I think we were just randomly picked. We received a small paper book in which we were to record our viewing habits, and FIVE BUCKS for our trouble! Woo hoo!
We spent the five bucks on tacos, and in the book I wrote “Nickelodeon” and drew a line covering the entire week. Good times!