EDITOR Allison Druin allisond@umiacs.umd.edu

And that, in many other counties, the customers don’t need to go through a program guide first to get to the TV channels, but in our county, they do. I’m really not sure how either of these explanations in any way relates to what happened to my grandparents. Are you saying that they should just start ignoring Washington, DC, news because Comcast says so? Or should they move to Baltimore County, so that they can have an easier-to-use set-top box?

I asked the person from Comcast if they had remote controls that would be easier for older users. He said that he thought that they might, somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. He then called his dispatcher, who said that rung a bell but didn’t think there were any in stock. So he called someone else, who said they placed an order for a senior-friendly remote. He said he had no idea when it would arrive, because he didn’t know where it needed to be ordered from. So they didn’t have any in stock, the employees of Comcast didn’t know that it was a choice, and they mentioned the senior-friendly remote control only because I pressed them about the availability of one. This might be one of those technically-this-is-possible-but-it-won’t-really-happen moments. We’re still waiting to hear back from Comcast about the remote. I’m not holding my breath.

As you’re reading this, if you know some of the major players in the cable-TV market in my area, you might be thinking, “Jonathan, why don’t you just switch them over to Verizon FIOS for their cable service?” Because Verizon requires a very similar set-top box, with another complex remote control. I actually think that the on-screen guides from Verizon have better fonts, but that’s really a moot point, because my grandparents refuse to switch to Verizon FIOS. Why? When you switch to Verizon FIOS for cable TV, they change your phone service. Your phone doesn’t work like before. If there is a power outage, your phone service doesn’t work (which it used to do). Except that Verizon installs a battery backup, so that your phone will work for only eight hours (or something similar) when the power goes out. The idea of not having phone service (or having it work for only a few hours) is incredibly frightening to people in their 80s and 90s. In addition, I think that my grandparents lived through a few long blackouts during their time in New York City. They have said, “ absolutely NO changes to our phone service. Period. We simply won’t discuss it.”

So my thought was to just update them to a TV with a digital tuner (the Comcast worker told me that no TVs have digital tuners, but clearly he was wrong). I tried that, but the four stations that are supposedly in digital did not come through, even with a digital tuner. So it’s not just a matter of a digital tuner, maybe Comcast is encoding it somehow so you can only receive the signal with a set-top box? If the TV-with-digital-tuner idea had worked, I would have just purchased a few different remotes (or used older remotes that my grandparents have) and tried to program those older remotes to work with the new TVs.” But wait; a new problem has occurred. Comcast recently changed all of its channel numbers. So local channels 11 and 13 (which have been available on 11 and 13 on cable for years) will now be available on 191 and 192 or something similar. I could program those channels as favorites, but to do so, I would need to use the Comcast set-top box and remote control… never mind! And I can see more problems ahead. The transition to broadcast digital TV in the USA is coming in 2009, and I think there are going to be many people who are confused, upset, frustrated, and disappointed.

Clearly, this company, and this industry, doesn’t know its users. Think about it. The older someone gets and the more infirmities they have, the more likely it is that they’ll be spending time at home, watching TV. The best customers are likely to be customers in their 80s or 90s, who may watch a lot of TV. Don’t worry about teenagers. They can figure out how to use a remote control. But customers in their 80s and 90s cannot. It was clear from my experiences that no one at Comcast had thought of this, or really cared. But it’s not just the cable companies.