Perks of a Cable Guy!

I had two DVR boxes and every channel unlimited, for about thirty dollars a month a customer would've paid three hundred for. I learned the difference between having everything and having enough. Turns out I was scrolling before anybody called it that — we just called it channel surfing. I had every channel. And even that had an off switch.

Before it was a job, it was the thing in the room. My grandma's house was the first TV I can remember — though not for anything that was ever playing on it. The box came in nineteen ninety-nine, and a technician put a remote in my hands — almost like he'd handed me the golden tool. Now I've got cable. Real cable.

Family Matters raised me, but I want to zone in on Carl.

All those roles live in the average man — husband, father, son, uncle, neighbor, cop — all at once. A sitcom used to hand you the whole man; the feed hands you the version that performs best.

Behind the wire and through the wire.

TV used to arrive in the living room and leave on a schedule. Now it lives in the hand and asks regular people to become the programming. We were cable-TV users; now we are internet users — and the internet uses us right back. Twenty-two years behind the wire, a wife, three boys, and a Carl Winslow impression that's still running the show.

Do you know what it's like to be watched? Not the feeling. The level. From a cable TV veteran who spent twenty years running the wire — a raw first transmission on how we stopped watching TV and became it.