Cha Cha Changes

Direct TV’s new slogan is “get Direct TV, It’ll change your life.” They are not the first to use this slogan. Books, cars, beds, diets, religions, and self help gurus have all intimated as much, but none seemed as preposterous as when Direct TV made a commercial declaring it.

How would getting Direct TV change my life? I’m not really sure. The suits at Direct TV must know something about me that I don’t. I have Comcast cable right now and I thoroughly disgusted with not only how much bad programming there is, but how much of it I find myself watching. It’s always been a held belief that expanding a sports league with more teams means adding more players of a lesser caliber. I guess the same principle applies to television. More channels means more time slots to fill up with shitty programming which in turn creates more ad revenue.

Maybe the ad execs for Direct TV meant my life would change this way when they said “It’ll change your life.” Watching Direct TV makes me spend even more time sitting in front of the tube which in turn cause me to gain weight, eat more potato chips and develop three blocked coronary arteries. As a result I need to get an emergency angioplasty procedure complete with stints put into my main arteries. This health scare forces me to reexamine my life. After a brief recovery period in the hospital, I change my diet, start to exercise and take up Bikram yoga.

At some point I wake up in my bed sweating and determine that I‘ve wasted thousands of hours watching other people live their lives instead of going out and living my own. With this new found lease on life, I travel to a spiritually rich/ poverty stricken country like India to find out that we are all connected, poverty stinks, cows are sacred, hot food makes you shit shards of glass and that living in the good ole USA is indeed a privilege. I then start a foundation that turns people’s old winter coats into recycled water receptacles for the poor to carry potable water in.
For a while, I notice every sunset and sunrise. I’m polite to waiters, rude drivers, DMV workers and even phone solicitors. I donate my time to local homeless soup kitchen on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I take up salsa dancing and run my first marathon. While on a trip to Italy to learn my true heritage, I sit in a posh bar sipping a bellini and glance up at the television. I shake my head and think inside how strange Italian television really is.

After 30 years of Direct TV changing my life, I develop early Alzheimers and I am lovingly forced into a nursing home by my wife of 40 years. My daughters visit me and kiss my forehead, then cry when think they are out of my sight. I forget they visited the day before only to ask them why they hadn’t visited me recently. They give me sad smiles and go back to their hectic lives. After lunch every day, the orderlies drag me into the “rec” room where myself and other vegetables(patients) are all positioned directly in front of a Television airing the latest programming via Direct TV. Yeah, you really changed my life Direct TV. Thanks for the memories.

According to a recent study in the UK, Every hour spent watching television each day increases the risk of dying from heart disease by almost a fifth. I’m not sure I understand this. According to my math, there are some days where I am seven fifths more likely to have a heart attack. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/11/watching-television-increases-death-heart-disease