Assault by Spoilerage

[tmcg]

So I'm at the post office. On line. Trapped like a rat. Not minding being on line, since I knew what I was getting into and I have to transact my business there and yeah it's the holidays and whaddya gonna do. But there's the TV overhead. With the sound more than audible. Because, you know, human beings are incapable of standing in one area for more than sixty seconds without being entertained. It's not like they can think their own thoughts, review their mental grocery lists, read the paper, meditate on the array of shipping materials available from the USPS, or anything like that. So the TV is showing The Maltese Falcon. Now, okay, I'm like some kind of troglodyte or something, but I have never seen this movie. And sometime I would like to. And the DVD is at the end of the film, and it's showing me how the mystery turns out!

AGGGGGHHHH.

Do I stand there with my package under my arm and my fingers stuck in my ears going "La la la, la la la"? Or humming the Colonel Bogey March, which is what my family did when I was a kid and the TV show insisted on showing what it was going to show you before it showed you, and there was no remote control and no Mute button and by the time you got up to turn the sound down you'd already have seen the entire trailer?

Do I capitalize upon this opportunity to hone my mental discipline in Zenlike focus on the dialogues of other transactions, the sounds of traffic outside, the murmurous haunts of my own mind, anything but the impassioned conversation Humphrey Bogart is having in this movie?

As my distress reaches a fever pitch, the person ahead of me on the line turns to me to complain about how slow the line is and how until a minute ago they had only one clerk's window open in the entire post office.

Saved by the gripe.

Comments

[akaspeedo.livejournal.com]

LOL! first to your never having seen this film, second to your description of how to avoid spoilers pre remote control. Yes, we *did* have a black and white tv when I was a kid, with what, three stations? Sheesh.

But I put it to you that if you had seen the last scene you might still not have understood what was going on, because it's that kind of movie. At least I find it confusing. I had to watch it twice!

Haven't even been to the post office yet. There are atm banks in the city that have tv's over each machine. It annoyes the crap out of me.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

I was in a gas station once where there were TVs over the pumps. I thought that one took the cake, but your ATMs beat it. Jeez louise.

Hmm, maybe I'm okay with the movie ending, then. I'll wait a bit for the memory to fade, such as it is, then rent it.

[(Anonymous)]

I was _so_ annoyed when they got a television in the service waiting area at my car dealership (yes, I actually lived in a time when this was not so!). I liked taking my car there when it was television-less because I could read and even write and you could hear the person announcing that your car was done. Now you have to sit there and try not to listen to (yikes!) the Fox News channel and strain your ears to hear what they're saying over the annoucement system.

Deb

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

That's true at the big doctor's office where I take a family member these days. You can't just tune out CNN to read your book, because then you won't hear your name called. I never had any trouble hearing our name called before there was a blaring TV, no matter how deep I was in my book.

Sometimes I get up to turn the TV down (it's overhead but the volume button is within reach), and a few minutes later someone else will always turn it up. I never mute it; you could just go sit nearer to it so you could hear, while the farther-away people could read their books. But it's never worth getting into a volume war.

At least it isn't Fox News. *g*