Dammit! It must be my reception area or something. I can't tune in HBO on my waffle iron for the life of me. Ever since I bought that George Foreman thing it's acted like shit....




THE
MICROWAVE HOOKED TO THE
VCR TO MAKE A
TV DINNER
AARDVARK

I've noticed similar problems with our digital TV receiver....every once in a while, the menus and the On Demand channels stop working. Unplug the receiver, wait a few seconds, plug it back in, and it starts working again (although sometimes I have to do this a few times before it takes).

It seems to me in this day and age that these things should NEVER do this.....appliances should not crash.

For the last couple of weeks I've been having a problem with my Directv service! It was distorting the picture pretty badly whenever a transparent menu was up, or after about 3-4 minutes.

I finally got a chance to deal with it today and called up Directv in order to get a new receiver. I still have the ancient one from five years ago that I got originally.

The automated system said to try a couple things before going any further. Hey what the hell... I am not an expert with these things, I don't mind trying the automated process first if it means talking to a real human later on.

They suggested that I unplug the receiver from the wall for 15 seconds. It can't hurt, right? So I did it.

And goddamn if that hasn't solved the problem. It's been on for 10 minutes with no distortion, and it's not freaking out when a menu is up.

The hell is going on with the firmware there? It worked for YEARS at a time without being turned off. Then it didn't. Then I unplugged it from power, plugged it back in and now it's OK? What kind of a software bug is that? I'm amazed.

Credit to Directv's automated phone system, then. These things almost never work but it did in this case.