John van Gurp

Dear Bar Owner,

Cut the TV already wouldya please?

I came to your bar to sit with friends and have a meal and a couple of drinks. I’m spending a fair bit of coin in your establishment so I can enjoy their company. We want to talk and laugh and joke around. We want to catch up on old times. We want to enjoy the atmosphere of a bar and the way good friends can draw together in a social setting.

If I wanted to watch TV I would have stayed home. It’s truly horrible and tacky and makes me want to not come to your place again. You’re seriously damaging that which you work so hard to market; the atmosphere and the ambiance that I will pay to enjoy.

Your TVs are all over the place, often tuned to different channels, bombarding your valuable customers with distracting and annoying visual noise. Why do we have to suffer through compulsory television? Who asked for it?

Give me a great beer list, give me tasty bar food, let me laugh at your staff’s witty jokes. I want to love coming to your place and I will spend all kinds of money there but if you pollute my evening with TVs I’ll go somewhere else.

Meanwhile I will be making full use of this handy gadget.

“Mitch Altman, the 50-year-old inventor of the TV-B-Gone, (says) that when he feels depressed he arms himself and heads into the streets. “It’s almost a compulsion for me. When I see a TV going in a public place, I go out of my way to turn it off,” he says.

“Imagine a room where there’s an uptight person wearing really bright clothing and jumping up and down and yelling. It’s hard to be relaxed when that person is present. When a TV goes off, I notice people’s shoulders and arms relax — the body language changes completely. When I’m feeling blue, I turn off a television or two and life just seems a whole lot better.”

Also posted at the Chronicle Herald myConnect site