Commercials - the bane of my living room

Why do commercials affect me so negatively?
I wish it were not so,
for when they come on,
my head hurts.

It's like a big ASS comes farting out of the TV screen.


























And so I must reach for the remote,
which creates dissent.

If I could,
I would be like everyone else,
and just ignore the commercials.
But there is no other option,
and I must be like myself.

I resent mind control.

I will not
drink their beer,
watch their movie,
or buy their car.

I will not be manipulated.

I must lack some filter
that everyone else has,
or maybe my ears are just too sensitive

Sometimes I do not like being me.

This is the next day, and I've had time to think more about this issue.

I think my distaste for commercials is rooted in three of the central traits of my personality.

One:
I'm the poster child for adult ADHD;
I am HIGHLY distractable.
In college I had trouble finding a place to study.
The dorm was too noisy,
and the library was too quiet;
the books on any nearby shelf always beckoned for my attention.
I could always find a reason to procrastinate and do anything other than studying,
such as making up song lists for my band.

This explains my mediocre college grades.

And so I cannot resist the distraction of commercials;
they intrude on my serenity
and make it impossible to think about anything
other than what they are trying to sell me.
(Which I know is their purpose.)

Two:
My ears are extremely sensitive to input.
(I don't mean that I can hear better than other people,
because I often have trouble understanding speech).

I mean that sounds affect me more - or differently - than most people.

When I first started work for C&P Telephone in 1969, the business office where I worked had Muzak playing through the overhead speakers. The sounds of crappy elevator music nearly drove me crazy, although the office full of 75 other workers seemed unaffected. I remember holding both my hands over my ears trying to concentrate on writing memos.

And so commercials rivet my attention in a very uncomfortable way.

Is this a kind of insanity - experiencing a vastly different reality than anyone else?)

Three:
I crave independence of thought.
Some kind of internal "intrusion attempt alarm" (for want of a better word) goes off in my head whenever I suspect that I am the object of an attempt to manipulate me.
I cannot control the bristling feeling inside when a voice shouts at me from the TV set,
or the seductive scene begins
that will end in a car commercial
or an ad for a TV show or movie.

It doesn't really matter whether I like the product or not;
I just cannot stand being manipulated.

Is this a kind of insanity?

I grew up in the 1950s-60s during the struggle for Civil Rights and the conflict over the Vietnam War.
Now in retrospect I realize that I had been fed a pack of lies all along.

Lies about the inferiority of black people,
lies about the nobility of the southern cause in the Civil War,
lies about the Vietnam war,
lies about Russia,
lies about sex.

It took nearly a lifetime for me to come to my own conclusions about these issues.

In the 1960s I wasn't sure who was telling the truth about Vietnam.
In college I had John Birch Society friends and listened to their impassioned arguments;
I also had "hippie" friends whose walls were plastered with SNCC and SDC anti-war posters;
I also listened to their impassioned arguments.
I tried my best to understand each point of view,
because I sensed that the real truth lay somewhere in between.

I remember seeing news of forced school integration in the south;
the fire hoses being turned on crowds of black people;
the violence after Martin Luther King's assassination.
From our house I could see the smoke rising from the riots in Washington DC.
I believed violence and destruction was wrong.
(In retrospect I don't know how else such fundamental social change could have come about.)

All the same, I was not one of those brave souls who participated in the protest marches.
I served in the Navy during 1968-69
and immediately thereafter began a career with C&P Telephone Company,
and was too concerned about keeping my job and supporting my family.
I stayed on the sidelines of life,
letting other people with stronger convictions man the front lines.

Boy, this post is wandering far afield from its initial focus on my distaste for commercials.
I suppose I got going on the track of explaining how I have acquired a built-in distaste for attempts to convince me of something I know I should determine for myself.

Okay, now I've wasted sufficient time at work
instead of doing my job.

Do you see that this is a perfect example of my ADHD?

To be continued...

Antique computers

I was first exposed to mainframe computing when I joined C&P Telephone Company in 1969 as Assistant Manager in the Fairfax, VA Business Office. I toured the company's billing office in Richmond, which used an IBM 360 mainframe with 16K of memory and took up an entire huge room, complete with its own cooling system. The floor was raised about a foot to make way for the extensive amount of wiring that connected the various elements of the computer.

Service Order Typists in the Business Office cut the orders using the Model 28 ASR Teletypewriter, which used 5-channel paper tape.

The Service Order Bureau also had a few of the "newer" 35 ASR Teletypewriter, which used 8-channel paper tape.

Service Order Representatives in the Business Office would hand-write the order on a special form. The orders were carried via a pneumatic tube system (which I designed) to the Service Order Typing Bureau. There Service Order Typists would create a punched paper tape. Each character was represented by a specific pattern of holes in the paper tape (either 5- or 8-channel). This tape was then fed through a tape reader. As the tape advanced to each position, little metal fingers protruded through each hole in the tape, generating an electric signal that was sent out over the service order network. The network operated at 110 baud, meaning that 110 characters were sent per minute. A long service order for a business with many extensions could take hours to transmit.

The service order network was hardwired and dedicated to only service orders. If one printer ran out of paper or jammed in the dozens of locations to which the multi-leg circuit terminated (which happened frequently), the entire network would go down until someone was dispatched to fix the problem.

In 1974 when I joined C&P's headquarters forecasting staff, I learned to use the mainframe timeshare (VM/CMS) system, with which I created mathematical models of customer demand using linear regression and multivariate econometric models. These models were run using "STATLIB", which was an acronym for "Bell System Statistical Computing Library." STATLIB was a high-level language based in FORTRAN and developed by Bell Labs. Input (data and models) was created by paper tape, which was fed into the computer and run on the mainframe, which was located in New Jersey. Most programs were run in batch mode, and the printed output would arrive several days later.

About that same time I bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 for my home, with which my son and I discovered the joys of programming in BASIC.

In 1984 my division received our first IBM personal computer, which was shared among 14 people. I was one of the early adopters and shortly thereafter spent $4,000 to buy an IBM PC-1 for my home, with which my son and I discovered how to write simple graphics programs using BASICA. It came with 64K of RAM, which I upgraded to 640K, the maximum that DOS could address at that time.