I may get the occasional check from their Bravo arm, but that will not stop me from gleefully masticating upon the palsied, fumbling hand that feeds me. What's causing my ire? The seemingly innocuous act of planning ahead.
The Olympics are coming up. My needs are relatively simple: I want to find out when the women's water polo coverage is on and -- more crucially -- which backwater cable outlet this wonderful sport will be exiled to. So I went to NBCOlympics.com, clicked on the TV coverage, went through the little survey so that I might get listings tailored to my specific cable package, and then ...
Nada. I got a grid filled with blank squares. To find out what's on when, you're supposed to click on the squares, thereby taking you away from the grid and making it more difficult to discern which sports are on simultaneously and thus require finessing the TiVo. And although the pull-down menus let you search by day, or channel, or sport, there is apparently no way to get all the comprehensive listings for a specific sport. Instead, you must search day-by-day to find out when your sport is on. This is inelegant, inefficient, and clearly designed by people who are being compensated per search query tonnage.
If my memory is not failing me at this late and uncaffeinated hour, I believe that NBC is a GE subsidiary. I also believe that NBC may be deliberately obfuscating such basic information as "When in the blue fuck is water polo on?" in the hopes that nutballs like me buy several GE-brand televisions, jack up our corresponding cable packages and descend into a panopticon-like environment of watching TV nonstop until Brenda Villa makes her appearance.
What, me, paranoid? No -- merely infuriated that NBC has managed to screw up the easiest thing on the Internet: a grid schedule.
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