The following is a rant.
Modern day office waiting areas – doctors, dentists, hospitals, banks, airports, etc. now share the annoying feature of a blaring, large-screen television mounted on the wall of their waiting areas. While waiting to be called in, you are a forced captive to whatever TV show the office staff has tuned in. It is always ten times too loud, and tuned to some show you hate.
Case in point. I went into my hospital this morning for a CT scan. The waiting area is huge so I tried to choose a seat as far away from the giant TV as I could. I headed for the very back of the room, and guess what? There was another TV mounted on the wall for the enjoyment of the people waiting in the back of the room! It was just as loud as the one in the front. The people in the waiting area were all staring at these TVs like a bunch of sheep.
Oh, please call me back soon, I silently prayed. Fortunately, they called me quickly, and led me back to a secondary waiting area near where the CT scanners were located. Oh, NO!! There were TVs mounted down the hall on the way to this new area, and another on the wall of the secondary area. I lost it.
“Would you PLEASE turn off this TV? I can’t stand it. Why do you think your patients can’t spend a few minutes of peace and quiet with their own thoughts? I don’t know how you people get any work done around here with these TVs blasting you all day. I would not be able to tolerate working in an environment like this.”
She said she would do that, and went up to some magic, hidden switch on the wall, and turned it off. I sighed with relief and sat down and pulled out my book. The other TVs in most waiting areas I’ve been in are mounted up high such that people can’t reach them to make any kind of adjustments in stations or volume. Either that, or they have a big sign warning people NOT to touch the set.
I tried getting one of those ‘universal remotes’ that would control any TV off the internet. Ah ha! I would just adjust the volume ,or whatever, of those annoying sets surreptitiously from my seat. This was a perfect solution. However, when it arrived in the mail, it became clear that you needed a tech degree from MIT, or someplace, to operate it. You first needed to program into it EXACTLY what brand AND model of TV you wanted to remotely control, along with a bunch of other specifications. There were several other steps that had to be performed before it would operate the offending TV remotely. Jeez-o-petes! That was not going to work. You can’t possibly get all that info from looking at the front of a TV set.
I asked a clinic manager in one of my doctor’s offices why they felt they needed to provide these TVs for their patients. She explained that the patients demanded it. Really? Demanded it? I now express my dismay over this horrible sound pollution directly to my doctors when I finally get in to see them. I patiently explain that there ought to be a separate area a person can sit and be free of this noise. It should be recognized as being as bad for your hearing and brain as second-hand tobacco smoke is for your health.
The other ironic thing is that many of these places have signs up telling people they must turn off their cell phones so they don’t disturb other people. You’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me!!!! My cell phone is going to disturb someone whose hearing is being actively destroyed by a blasting TV?? I couldn’t even hear it ring, and having a conversation on the phone amongst all that racket, would be impossible.
There didn’t used to be TVs everywhere you went. They have cropped up like poisonous weeds, and spread just as fast. At one of the Albertson’s grocery stores in Gresham, Oregon, Paul and I went in one day to find TVs at EACH check-out lane! They were tuned to a station called “Check-Out TV.” They were just a continuous stream of ads urging you to buy more stuff. We asked to see the store manager and told him that we would no longer shop at their store as long as they had those annoying ad machines blasting away at us while we unloaded our groceries onto the belt. He said they were a test store for them. We said we wouldn’t be back as long as they were there. Sometimes you just have to vote with your business.
I’ve gotten used to the background music that you hear all the time in the supermarkets. Studies have been done that show that customers are happier and buy more products when they have up-beat music playing in the background. The songs are mostly oldies. I still don’t get how listening to Prince’s old 1980s song “Raspberry Beret” makes me want to buy more food? Nor does hearing “Un-break My Heart” make me want to put everything back and leave. Clearly, word content doesn’t matter as much as catchiness.
Maybe it is just me, but others I talk to agree that they would rather have it quiet in their doctor’s office, so they could just read a book or check their email or their Facebook page on their iPad or smartphone. I am hoping that if enough people voice their complaints about this racket everywhere you go these days, it may change. It seems we should be as entitled to a quiet environment the same as we are entitled to have smoke-free air to breathe. As it is now, people like me don’t have any choice but to be subjected to TV noise pollution at every turn.
Anybody else notice this?
carpyharpy 