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Enjoy these views of the chaotic world around us. Click on "Pages" in the right column below my bio for additional expressions of life in the fast lane. Share your thoughts by contacting me at mmjagger1946@gmail.com

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Lost in a Television "Time Suck".

So I read this editorial in the Boston Globe recently about things that “Time-Suck” your life!

Let me back up a bit. To define Time Suck is easy; to avoid it is a tricky mine field!  Anything that takes over your day before you have the chance to notice your day is gone is a  “Time-Suck”.  It’s silent and insidious, and addictive!

For example, not long ago, I flipped the television channel to TV Land and noticed a Brady Bunch all day and night marathon.  Normally, in fact almost all the time, I would just wax nostalgic about the good old days of the Brady Bunch and then keep flipping the channels for the next half hour (which is, in itself, a major “Time Suck”).  This time, much to my shock and bereavement, I noticed the reason for the marathon.  Alice, the Brady Bunch housekeeper, and dearly beloved by the Brady Bunch, and all television viewers, passed away at the tender age of 88 years old.  Where did the time go? My flashbacks to the early ‘70’s seem indelibly etched in my brain.  Can she have gone from 40 something to almost 90 in some television time warp that I didn’t even recognize? That makes me—umm-never mind!!! But I digress from my original thought.  Well, in between the tears and loss, for Ann Davis, for my own memories of the Brady Bunch and raising my own children, for humanity’s loss of such a sensitive and loveable housekeeper, well, you guessed it!  I started watching Alice tributes, in one half hour segments from 6:00pm-10:00pm. By the time I really noticed what I had done, I had been engulfed full force in a major “Time Suck”!  And then what? I felt happy that I had been with her as a fitting and proper tribute to her memory, but angry at myself, that a half hour of remembrance was not enough. 

The “Time Suck” hits when you least expect it!  It’s a sucker punch—one that throws your entire perfectly scheduled day planner dead on its ear! The most common “Time Suck” for me is finding the perfect television show to watch. So I take the remote, and to save time, I press the red button to see the guide.  I scroll down the screen, sometimes a page at a time, instead of just one by one (I’m proud of myself for saving time!), and I can’t seem to find the perfect program that won’t waste my time watching.

“ I hate people who are time wasters,”  I tell myself. I am efficient at my use of time, even in my television watching. So I continue-- page after page after page after page.  Sometimes I stop and press the information button to see exactly what I will be seeing on NCIS or some other program. I don’t want to waste my time if I don’t think I’ll like the content of the program, yet I am willing to watch reruns of NCIS just to see the cute, dysfunctional things Gibbs will do or Tony Denozo (my personal favorite)!  That’s a “Time Suck” within a “Time Suck”  --double “Time Sucking”!

My goodness, is there no end to my wasting time?  Well, now that I’ve determined that maybe I will come back to channel 31, I continue to scroll pages well into the three hundred numbers, even though I clearly know that I cannot get any of these channels.  I then decide to go to Xfinity and see what I may have missed last week on my favorite programs! Maybe I can catch a particularly fun episode of NCIS where Abby does something really cool!  So now, I must decide between regular cable NCIS or Xfinity NCIS.  I choose Xfinity because I feel like I actually chose the episode tailored to my viewing need.  I then begin to watch the program on Xfinity.  I used to be able to fast forward through all the commercials to save time, knowing I am wasting it on some unconscious level.  Now, there is a disclaimer that “Fast Forward Button MAY be disabled”.  That means I WILL have to watch all the commercials and that I am in a conscious “Time Suck” hell!  But I justify it with, “At least I can mute the commercials”.  Now I have a “Time Suck” within a “Time Suck”!  Double Time Suck! Yuck!  So, in the end, I have “Time Sucked for three hours –between mindlessly (although I thought I was being methodical) flipping through the remote, both traditional channels and Xfinity, and watching the one 60 minute episode of NCIS where I had no control over fast forwarding, although I DID have the power to actually re-wind to the beginning, thus I could, theoretically, “Time Suck” through an additional 60 minutes, should I choose to!  

I wish I wouldn’t have read that original article about “Time Sucking” in the Boston Globe! I know I would have been a lot happier!  I never used to think that much about how much time I actually wasted.  And that’s just on the television flipping and re-runs.  Imagine how much other time I managed to “Suck” up into the universe, never to recover!  I should be ashamed of myself.  I will be—as soon as I check out what’s on TV tonight!


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