The Tale of Nancy, the Talking TV

Our TV got too big for its britches over the weekend.

Out of the blue, it started reading everything on the screen aloud.

For example, “The volume is set to 37. Now playing. Press OK to pause. Fifteen minutes and 37 seconds remaining,” and so on and so forth.

It was a real Nancy smarty pants. To make it worse, she was loud.

I can put up with a lot, but I cannot put up with my TV reading to me. It was like being waterboarded.

OK, I’m sure it was nothing like that, but annoying doesn’t begin to explain it.

I thought it was a Netflix thing, so, just like grandpa did back in his day, I googled it to find a solution.

I really didn’t find anything. That might be because I didn’t know how to phrase, “My TV is talking to me” in order to get the results I needed.

I went online and initiated a chat with customer service.

The first person didn’t understand what I was talking about.

The second one didn’t either.

Neither did the third.

This column was originally going to be about how bad Netflix customer service is.

Then I realized if you get divorced three times, you are most likely the problem. This was pretty much the same principle.

After another day or so of torture, I figured out it was a setting on the TV itself. I apologize, Netflix.

As it turns out, the solution was to hold the mute button for 3 seconds, and it’s goodbye Nancy smarty pants.

***

The other day, I ran across someone’s online description of himself — his bio as we call it. I don’t recall if it was on social media or a website or where. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the person calling himself a “guru” of whatever it is that he does.

Here’s the deal. If no one has ever heard of you, you’re not a guru.

You’re just one of us.

I never heard Michael Jordan call himself a basketball guru.

Mick Jagger doesn’t refer to himself as the guru of rock-n-roll.

Nancy smarty pants was the guru of making me lose my mind, but she never said it.

***

As I have mentioned many times before, I keep a list of column ideas on my computer.

I love it when I refer back to the list and think, “Oh yes. This will be fun to write about.”

But it’s disheartening to see ideas that make me wonder what I was thinking.

And it's even worse when an idea doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever when I go back and read it.

Here is the best example ever: “Bride magazines. This is how terrorists learn to make bombs on the internet.”

Don’t go back and read it again. You read it correctly. It’s not you, it’s me.

I do remember this has something to do with Kim finding some old bride-to-be magazines at her mother’s house. But I can’t for the life of me connect the dots between that and terrorism.

On that note, I’m not going to terrorize you any longer.