Last December, the departmental manager had a TV installed in the office where I work. The stated purpose was that we would leave it tuned to news channels, but everyone assumed that the real purpose was to use up some of the budget at the end of the year.

The oldest guy in the office likes it tuned to CNN. The youngest guy prefers Al Jazeera America. There's one guy that likes Fox News, and another that tunes to the MSNBC. He told me doesn't think that's the best news source, but he enjoys irritating the Fox News guy.

For most of us the TV is basically useless as a new source. We work at real-time terminals, and have lots of Google News alerts to let us know about anything that's actually relevant to our jobs. But the TV is nice for me, because when I'm working overnights and the manager is at home sleeping the sleep of the just, I can change the channel to something more entertaining.

We get a special corporate channel package, with basically every news channel that Time Warner offers. But there are a strange collection of other channels too. We get the NFL Network. (Apparently because one of the guys called in a favor.) We get the Military Channel. We get H2 but not the original History Channel. We get the Cooking Network but not Food TV. Country Music Television, but no other music channels. It's all very strange.

My favorite random channel has been El Ray Network, which doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry last I looked. It's basically the Quentin Terantino and Robert Rodriguez channel, if you know who they are. I watch it because Saturday nights they show six hours worth of classic kung fu movies.

Sadly, last week we had to add some more equipment to the office, and it went where the TV was. So some technicians came in and installed a wall mount for the TV on the wall behind everyone's backs. It's nice that it's out of the way, but now the original purpose is completely obviated, since you can only watch the TV by turning away from the computer where you are expected to do your actual job. Originally it was in one's peripheral vision. I figure in another six months it'll be gone.

Or maybe there'll be more money left over in the budget, and we'll get a second TV.

Posted by: Boviate at 08:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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