TV Trickery

I rarely pay any attention to the big screen TVs running constantly in the Study Cafe. The sound is off and only closed captioning tells the viewer what is happening, so its just background clutter as far as I am concerned. The college selected one news channel and one sports channel and they are permanently set unless we need to manually change them for special events.

My first suspicion that something was awry was when several of my staff told me that the Cartoon Network was playing on one of the screens. How could that be? It takes three staff a half hour to figure out how to change those channels when we have special events, even with the written directions in front of us!

I know the younger generation is tech savvy, but without the two remotes, they would not be able to change anything. If they merely touched the buttons on the screen, it throws the screen out of the right network and all you get is fuzzy static. Curious. I sputtered grumpily as I dragged out the instructions and fiddled with the two boxes hidden behind the screens. I finally got it reset and went back to the desk only to be told five minutes later that the cartoon network was on one of the screens again!

One of my staff suggested that with a universal remote a person could probably figure out how to gain access, so we scoped the place to see if some joker was playing games with us, switching things around just to take us for a ride. We couldn't find anyone but a single young lady who had been around both times we were in the cafe, and the staff person vouched for her. I was suspicious but thoroughly steeped in innocent until proven guilty.

I finally called Media Services after the third round, and they told me they had encountered this before. No student would be lucky enough to figure out the frequencies, but sometimes a radio frequency or laser beam from outside the building could interfere. They would check it out and get back to me. Feeling somewhat restored that I wasn't being jerked around by a malicious student, we spent the better part of the morning messing with the screens whenever the channel decided to go rogue.

After lunch, I saw I had missed a call from one of the IT guys. Even though he had not left a message, I called him back - I try my best to jump through hoops for the IT guys since we are so tech dependent. Turns out, they were having trouble with getting one of the channels over in their hub, so they were monkeying with the set up and hadn't realized it was affecting us! Mystery solved. I put the remotes back in the locked cabinet with a giggle. A story to tell my children.