January 25, 2017 Article

The Old Coot is getting pushed into the dark.

By Merlin Lessler

Only an old coot would have a complaint as irrelevant to everyday life as this. But, that’s what us old coots do. Some people call it nitpicking; we call it enlightened thinking. We are of the same school of thought as the mayor and police commissioner in New York City when they launched their “nitpicking” plan to reduce crime. They went after the little stuff on the premise that then the big stuff would fall in line. I’m not sure what the little stuff was, maybe jaywalking, littering, loitering, public intoxication and the like. But, somehow it worked and eventually the crime rate came down. Dramatically. Might just have been a coincidence. We’ll never know.

That’s a long justification for launching yet another petty attack on something most people don’t notice or care about. It’s the TV schedule published in the newspaper. The morning paper. The schedule covers the hours from six pm to midnight. What about the rest of the day? What’s on at noon, two pm, 4 o’clock or in the middle of the night when we wake up and can’t get back to sleep? Inquiring (old coot) minds want to know.

All daily papers are like this. If they were evening papers I could see it, having been an evening press delivery “boy” some sixty years ago. We got our bundle of papers dropped off by the circulation “guy” around 3:30, a little after we got out of school. Our orders were to get them delivered by five o’clock so when “Mr.” breadwinner came home from work he could sit in his easy chair, maybe with a cocktail or a bottle of beer (no cans in those days) while the “little woman” (sometimes referred to as the “old lady” by some unenlightened husbands) fixed dinner. What can I say, ours was a “Father knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet world? Men had their role; women had theirs. And, the twain shall never meet.

Anyhow, I’ve got to get this gasbag (me) back on the topic at hand, “Less than useful TV listings in the daily papers,” for the sake of my old coot brethren who want to know what might be watchable at odd moments in the day. We know a full week’s worth of schedules, 24 hours a day, is included in the Sunday paper, which if we thought to save would still be of no use since we’d never remember where we put it. At one time, there was a channel that scrolled through a list of what was on or coming on, but that’s gone and it wasn’t much good anyway. It took ten minutes to scroll the channels, well beyond the attention span an old coot. And, cheapskates that we are, most of us turned in our control boxes, that afford access to a schedule, to save the $8.50 monthly rental rate. So, we’re in the dark, literally, wondering what’s on TV this afternoon. Now, I feel better, getting that off my chest. I bet you don’t.

Comments, complaints? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com