I’m always preaching about people that call technical support lines. 90% of these callers can usually solve problems themselves if they either restart or reset the device they are using or play around with it a little bit. Instead they would prefer to dump it in the lap of somebody else and act helpless. Well, I am no longer able to preach about this as though I have never done such a thing myself.

This last Thanksgiving weekend I was driving down a country road listening to my beloved Bears on my Sirius radio. They are storming up the field in the 4th quarter. They ended up scoring 14 unanswered points to force an overtime against the Broncos. Suddenly I hear a guy talking about golf coming from my radio. It seemed to just fade right in and took over the station. Note that Sirius uses stations that are not NFL stations when games aren’t on. The NASCAR and trucker station switches over to NFL games on Sunday. Immediately I begin thinking somebody over at Sirius hit a button that started putting this crap on because they think the game is over. It was overtime and I was missing the game!

I promptly pick up my cell phone and call Sirius complaining about the problem. I tell the agent that golf talk has suddenly interrupted my Bears game and I want it back on. I was furious to think how why I pay for radio if this is going to happen.

Suddenly I look among the farms surrounding me and my car on this lonely road. I find radio antennas everywhere. My Sirius radio sends a signal to 88.7. Could it be that I wandered into an area where 88.7 was being used by a radio station? I switched the radio over to 88.9 and set the Sirius radio to broadcast to that station. Yep! Embarrassed, I hung up on the Sirius agent before he caught onto me.