Yesterday afternoon, after my girlfriend got to her mother’s house to help her for a few days, I got a call from her asking what could be wrong with her television or her remote. Her mother is somewhat house-ridden because she has C.O.P.D, and the television is her primary means of entertainment. So, having long ago anticipated that something like this might happen, given how my own similar HD cable set up does that wackiest things now and then, I had on my phone photos I had taken of both of her remote control devices for the television and the cable, and I used them to start to trouble shoot with her.
It doesn’t take an elderly person to hit a couple wrong buttons in sequence to find themselves neck deep in a menagerie of error line input messages and a black screen. I’ve done it myself too many times. So speaking with my girlfriend, I walked her through a few of the options of what might be wrong and how to correct the possible problem(s). In the past, this has worked, but as the evening went on, I couldn’t seem to untangle whatever the problem was over the phone.
So I told my girlfriend to call their cable company’s tech support, which happened to still be open. This was about 9:00pm in the evening. I thought that there was possibly some system problem that the cable company might know about, and which I didn’t. But after about forty-five minutes, I texted my girlfriend and asked her if she had solved the problem. She called back. “Nope!” The lady on the tech line had tried to have her use the television remote (as opposed to the cable remote) and had told her to make sure the line in was on HDMI 1. But nothing had happened. She also reported back to me that the first time that someone from the cable company could go out there would be Monday.
It doesn’t take an elderly person to hit a couple wrong buttons in sequence to find themselves neck deep in a menagerie of error line input messages and a black screen. I’ve done it myself too many times. So speaking with my girlfriend, I walked her through a few of the options of what might be wrong and how to correct the possible problem(s). In the past, this has worked, but as the evening went on, I couldn’t seem to untangle whatever the problem was over the phone.
So I told my girlfriend to call their cable company’s tech support, which happened to still be open. This was about 9:00pm in the evening. I thought that there was possibly some system problem that the cable company might know about, and which I didn’t. But after about forty-five minutes, I texted my girlfriend and asked her if she had solved the problem. She called back. “Nope!” The lady on the tech line had tried to have her use the television remote (as opposed to the cable remote) and had told her to make sure the line in was on HDMI 1. But nothing had happened. She also reported back to me that the first time that someone from the cable company could go out there would be Monday.