TV has always been there for me.
TV has made me laugh, it's there for me on rainy days and sunny ones, TV has kept me company, and turned me into a formidable Trivial Pursuit opponent (How do I know that Lombard Street is the crookedest street in the world? Not by reading a book! By watching The Real World: San Francisco!)
TV has been so good to me, in fact, that I felt like I wanted to give back. So when the Nielsen TV Ratings company called us a little over a year ago to see if we would participate in their program, I enthusiastically said yes. I didn't know much about how the Nielsen data were collected; I thought maybe we were in for some paper surveys or telephone surveys. But I was wrong. Shortly after we signed up, three Nielsen tech geeks stormed our home ala the movie E.T. and tore apart all our televisions. They jammed some sort of homing beacon into all of them and then added some device for communicating to our family room TV -- the "Mother Ship" -- which would then hijack our phone line once a day and spew forth the TV data back to guys in labcoats at Nielsen HQ. It might not have been that dramatic -- I have been watching Alias a lot lately.
Despite the technological intrusion, I felt pretty special that my TV viewing habits counted towards something. When I was watching a Magic Bullet infomercial, it meant 60,000 other Utahns were too. Sometimes I’d leave the TV on C-Span all day, just to try to make us Utahns seem smarter.
Shortly after the installation, however, the honeymoon was over. Our downstairs TV started doing some crazy things, like the picture not coming on. The reception on the upstairs TV got really bad, despite the fact that we were watching cable and not off of an antenna. The phone calls began, too. We’d get phone calls from Nielsen's for everything. “Please turn your TV to Channel 3 for 2 minutes, then switch channels, and leave it on for another 2 minutes. We’re running diagnostics on your system because something isn’t right…” They would call and ask us if we had the volume on our TV up really loud (no). They would call and ask if we’d left our TV on for 3 weeks (no). They would call and ask if we’d purchased a new VCR or DVD player (no).
We have a TV downstairs that is used solely for video games. It’s an old, beat up TV that is not connected to cable or an antenna and therefore doesn’t get reception. During the installation, Nielsen’s insisted that they hook their equipment up to this TV because the TV picked up the sound on one of the Spanish channels. The sound! No picture! Just the sound! On the Spanish channel! So in addition to all of the above calls, Nielsen’s actually called once because I hadn’t played the Playstation for 3 weeks and they were wondering if everything was okay.
If it had only been the phone calls, we might have survived. But it wasn’t: the technicians had to come to our house several times over the year – 5 or 6 times as a matter of fact. Their visits lasted anywhere from 1 ½ hours to 4 or 5 hours. Most of the technicians were nice, but there were a few issues: one would leave a lingering cigarette odor in the house, one would do a ‘diagnosis’ on our gaming equipment by playing up to 3 levels of Super Mario Brothers on our NES, one stunk up our bathroom. In the end, it wasn’t the technicians but the large amount of time they spent at our house – keeping up from running errands or pretty much doing anything – that got super annoying.
We did make a cool $90 or so for our time in the survey. They pay $30 every 6 months to offset any higher electrical bills you may experience from their equipment.
All of the phone calls and visits finally put us over the edge. They came on Monday (Daddy/Daughter Day VI) to remove all of their equipment. Interestingly, the removal process was quite easy.
All in all, it was fun to participate in a nationwide survey that appears weekly in the newspaper, but the cost was not worth the benefit. Even for TV’s sake.
1 comment:
That sounds like a Seinfeld episode!
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