War is strange

Today being Thursday, my two fellow closed-captioners and I made our usual noontime pilgrimage to an eating spot in the greater San Fernando Valley region. Today's restaurant of choice was the Fuddruckers in beautiful downtown Burbank.

We seated ourselves in an area that was unoccupied, where there happened to be two television sets tuned to CBS, and watched Dan Rather use a pen to point at a map of the Middle East. ("What is this, 1974?" asked one of my co-workers.)

Gradually, a few more people gravitated toward this area to eat their hamburgers. Eventually, the manager came in and asked if we were watching the news, or if he could turn to the NCAA tournament. Getting no response because we really didn't care, he got up on a chair to manipulate the DirecTV box.

He flipped around the various CBS feeds for a minute or so, apparently perplexed by the fact that although the on-screen schedule listed the basketball games, it was nothing but news on CBS. Finally, I yelled out, "ESPN!" "Oh, yeah," he said.

Not having a remote, he flipped through all the pay-per-view movies, eventually coming back around to the bottom of the DirecTV dial, and discovered that ESPN wasn't coming up, just the "for ordering information, call Customer Service" notice. He left it on CNN, which probably has better news coverage than CBS, but which doesn't have an anchorman as crazy as Dan Rather.

In conclusion, don't go to the Fuddruckers in Burbank expecting to watch a major sporting event airing on ESPN, because their DirecTV subscription doesn't include it.