I watched the news this afternoon. I seldom do this voluntarily but I was at the gym and not about to risk the ire of the crazy seniors on the recumbent bikes; I was just thankful that for once the TV wasn't tuned to Championship Darts. In our house, Husband is the news watcher, I prefer to get my social commentary from Spongebob, Stewie and You Tube.
As you will see, I have been missing out.
Normally I would not bother to pay attention to the television while I focus on not hating my workout but my iPod batteries chose that day to calve so I had little else to occupy my mind. I stared for a while at the closed captioning-enabled news broadcast before I noticed something absolutely magical was happening on screen.
Every second or third sentence would contain a word which was misspelled (unless Marcia MacMillan was reporting about the 'one yeast anniversary of the earthqwerk in Haiti'). On it's own that isn't outstanding, since everyone, even tele-typists, can make mistakes. They're only human and aren't due to be replaced by robots until Skynet goes online. But sometimes the words would stop altogether, as the broadcaster went on, then a gobbledygook of nonsense would appear on the screen like "ghjk" or "frmp" followed by what I can only assume was the typists' best guess at what they had missed. Awesome.
Seriously.
I took a look around at all the other treaders and peddlers and no one seemed to be noticing which was actually even more wonderful than the captioning itself.
I think this magical little moment taught me something important; that good comedy doesn't just come from a little square sponge under the sea, that people will sometimes overlook the extraordinary when the ordinary gets in the way and that even high school drop outs with only one finger can still be gainfully employed in the broadcast news industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment