My, Grandma....What Big Eye You Have!

The following is a true story.....seriously.

A friend of mine, I'll call him Mr. Naive, bought a digital TV a couple of weeks ago. Well, he had the parental locks set on it so that his children could not access certain channels. One day he wanted to access one of those channels for himself. He couldn't remember the password he had used to set the locks, and he couldn't find the paperwork where he had written it down. (Organization is obviously not one of Mr. Naive's strong suits.)

So, he went to the store where he had bought it to see if they could help him. Of course, they could not. But they did give him a phone number to call. He goes home, he calls the number. After a couple of mechanical menus and a few minutes of irritation, he reaches a real live person. Great! Now we can fix the problem. We'll call the real live person on the other end of the phone Mr. Brother.....Mr. B. Brother if you will.

Okay, Mr. Brother asks Mr. Naive to look on the back of the TV set and give him the registration number and so Mr. Naive does. A few keystrokes later, Mr. Brother says, "Okay, okay...there.....I've GOTCHA!" Mr. Naive does not like the sound of this and asks "What do you mean?" to which Mr. Brother responds "I'm looking at your house from one of our satellites....go outside." Mr. Naive goes outside and Mr. Brother says " Yeah, there you are at such and such street. You're wearing a red shirt and you have a blue truck parked in the drive." At this point Mr. Naive is starting to freak out a little and goes back in the house.

Once back in the house, Mr. Brother asks Mr. Naive to take a seat and he will fix the problem with his TV. He says that it will take a few moments and suggests that Mr. Naive might want to get something to drink. Mr. Naive says that he already has a soda to which Mr. Brother responds "No, you don't....I'm looking right at you." He then went on to describe Mr. Naive's living room furniture, etc. right down to the pictures on the walls. How could he do this? Well, it turns out that Mr. Brother was looking at Mr. Naive through his own TV.

What? Mr. Naive is then instructed to turn his TV off and Mr. Brother will then fry the system so that he can access whatever channels he wants. Of course, this will permanently wreck his parental lock system so that he can never use it again...but I don't think that at this point Mr. Naive really cares. So, after a second the big green dot appears on the screen, gets brighter and brighter, the TV starts rattling (literally shaking like it will explode) and poof, it's done. The TV is reset. And so is Mr. Naive's trust in his government.

You know, way back when Orwell wrote 1984, big brother was really just a matter of fantasy. Now it is a matter of reality. There are cameras on our street corners, at every traffic light, in every sewer and subway system. Some of these are for safety reasons, sure. But why in the world would you want to look into my living room or my bedroom? And now we have this whole switch over to digital TV for everyone in 2009. Hmmmmm...........I am not a conspiracy theorist or anything.....my name is not Fox Mulder. But it will certainly make you think won't it?

And it makes me think that I'll be doing a whole lot more reading in the future, because I"m probably throwing my TVs out. They might view me with some other camera but they're not gonna get my help to do it.

Just remember, next time you go outside SMILE for the camera that's watching you.......and if there are no small children around, you can use your favorite obscene gesture as well:)

Peace allllllllll..................