everything will turn out alright

Local radio has been getting progressively worse. One of the three remaining decent stations, 100.5, recently converted to a contemporary Christian format. Unfortunately, I can’t stand contemporary Christian music.

The new radio station here in Charleston is called His Radio, so I figured you’d be the one to speak to about it. Why is your radio station, and, by extension, most modern music that bears your name, so terrible?

Sincerely,

John Riney, music-loving heathern

So I figured I’d cough up the extra tenner a month for a music-only XM subscription. My car has the receiver in it and all, so it took five minutes to sign up and get it activated. “It will take 2-3 hours for your subscription to be updated.” Okay! So I did this last night and went to bed.

I awoke this morning, went out to the car to drive to work, and cranked up the satellite. Well, where I previously had one channel, “Preview”, I now had ten. And one of them was all Elvis. So I had nine. I paid for seventy-something. I didn’t want to unlock my house again, so I pulled out my iPhone, logged into their site, and saw a button for “Transmit Update”. I mashed that. It said to leave the radio on, it would take a few minutes. I grumbled a bit. “I gave these tools TEN DOLLARS. And I have to wait for their stupid service to kick on?”

Then I thought about what I had just done. I used my pocket-sized Internet access terminal to make an encrypted connection over a nearly-ubiquitous wireless communications network to a company, who, in turn, routed my request to a ground station, up to a pair of SATELLITES IN GEOSTATIONARY ORBIT, who then beamed a signal down to THE SATELLITE RECEIVER IN MY CAR. I shut up and quit grumbling then, because I realized I LIVED IN THE FUCKING FUTURE.

After about ten minutes, the audio hitched for a second and resumed, all seventy-odd channels enabled. The first song? “Don’t Worry, Baby”, one of my very favorites.