The Wrong Side of the Building

Yesterday I was talking to my older sister on the phone after work. We started with the usual — day-to-day stuff, checking on the kids — and eventually got to what the kids were up to. I mentioned that my daughters were, at that exact moment, watching a rerun of Friends. She told me she never really got into it back when it was still airing live, mostly because she didn't want to make time for something just because it was popular. She's always been that way — if something's popular, it's almost like she deliberately ignores it, just on principle.

One thing led to another, and I mentioned that back in college, I was very much into Seinfeld. I'd watch the reruns on the WB — channel 11 — and catch the live episodes whenever they aired.

That reminded me of something I've always found a little funny, and probably completely inconsequential if you were born after the '90s. Back in college, I didn't have cable TV in my dorm room. If you wanted to watch television at all, you needed your own TV, complete with rabbit-ear antennas. There was a TV with actual cable in the main lounge, with access to a bunch of channels, but it was first-come, first-served — if you wanted to watch something, you had to camp out early and basically hold the room hostage so you could watch what you wanted instead of whatever everyone else was after. I did that a few times when the Chicago Bulls were playing. But most of the time, it was a gamble.

So the backup plan was having your own TV in your room. Here's the catch, though: one side of the dorm — say, the north side — could only pull in a strong enough signal through the antenna to get three channels. None of them was the WB. The other side of the building could pick up three completely different channels, and one of them was the WB. Naturally, I was on the wrong side of the building, which meant no Seinfeld, or much of anything else I actually wanted to watch.

I lived in that same dorm all four years. One weekend, when I'd gone home, my roommate got caught drinking with another guy from a couple of doors down — both of them underage. As punishment, they were both kicked out of the dorm, and I suddenly found myself without a roommate. As it happened, I knew the other guy who'd been caught, and I knew his old roommate too. One thing led to another, and the two of us — me and his now-former roommate — agreed it made sense to just finish out the semester together.

The next semester, when the housing lottery came around to figure out who'd be rooming with whom and which room you'd get, we applied together and landed a room on the opposite end of the building — the side with the channel I actually cared about. So we got the room, and that's when I finally started watching the WB again.

Another semester went by, and then the school brought cable — and an Ethernet connection — to every single room. The whole elaborate scheme suddenly became a moot point.

It was funny telling my sister about all this — that I once had to scheme and strategize over dorm room assignments just to watch one TV show. And something funny happened once I actually got into that room with cable: most nights I'd watch the Seinfeld rerun, I think around 11 o'clock. But since I now had cable, once that was over I'd flip over to the Animal Channel and fall asleep to the narrator's voice describing wildlife out on the Serengeti. That's how I fell asleep for the rest of my time in college.

Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash