Dear dimwit on the phone

Anyone been getting the "What channel is truTV" calls?

 

None so far...but I know I was curious where it was.
So I...GASP!...used my TV guide button and looked for it myself....


And. I. found. it!


WHAT IS THIS DARK MAGIC!?

 

I did. to be fair, the cable company in the area doesn't carry it

 

When you have 200+ channels, who the hell knows what is on? I didn't realize until the other night that we got FXX. It's up in the 700-level tier where I rarely venture.

 

Not yet, but I'm surprised we haven't gotten any wondering why it's not on Comcast's lineup anymore. They dropped it last year.

 

I got a few of the what/where is TruTV. Since I'm in NC, all I really have to say is, "the channel that has Lizard Lick Towing." I had a guy who used to call me all the time and ask my opinion about betting lines for football games. I always tried to be polite…until the night he called me 20 minutes before deadline.

 

I have Comcast and it's No. 187. I found it via the remote menu button... Two clicks and I can locate all the basketball. Or soccer. Or tennis!

I'd be amazed if anyone calls my office to ask about TV channels. I also can't help because we have entirely too many cable options in the area.

I did, however, get a call asking about the women's NIT before the NCAA brackets had been announced. Oddly, that call was supposed to go to a sister paper -- but our sports department's 800 number was listed in the wrong "contact us" box. I will blame that county for any future random questions.

 

Stopped listing channel numbers years ago, between cable tiers, satellites, Uverse and good ol' antennas. Too many to remember, too little space. Don't even use local call letters, unless they've got something outside the networks on, like the Podunk Tech game or they're part of some team's network. Anyone calls, I refer them to their service provider. All you can do, really.

 

I hope all of our friends in the TV biz who work at CBS affiliated are enjoying their annual tradition of fielding calls from people pissed off that their soaps aren't on.

 

Sometimes callers claim that their cable provider couldn't help them find the number of a station before they called to ask us, so either there are bigger dimwits answering the phone for the cable companies, the callers are flat out lying about it (you should hear some of the obvious lies we get from the repeat callers when they preface the question they're about to ask), or the callers are making errors when asking and therefore aren't getting the answer they're looking for.

Is it an urban legend that TV stations got complaints about soap operas being preempted by 9/11? Or did that actually happen because it happens every other time there's a preemption?

 

In the town I work in, calls to the "local" number for the cable company in the phone book are automatically routed to someone in Dallas. So it's likely that the person on the other end has no way of knowing which channel anything is on where you're calling from. So if you call in saying, "I have something wrong on channel 63," the guy on the other end has no answer for you except that he'll send someone out between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. And I don't even know if he's allowed to switch you to the local office, where they might actually know what's wrong.

I used to just walk into the local office. One time, the receptionist gave me the number technicians use to contact her in the local office to see if there's anywhere they need to go next.

 

Yep. Happened to me. I ended up parking in the boonies and walking nearly two miles to the will call gate to get my press pass.