Random Blackouts

One Sunday evening in June, three regular guys are settled into a
corner of the bar at Figlio in Uptown, within spitting distance of one
of the room’s three flat-screen televisions. On the tube: men’s beach
volleyball on Fox Sports.

My friend and I plant ourselves across from them, armed with a stealthy
little device that hangs from my keychain and looks vaguely like a
Batman toy or a keyless entry fob. Invented by a forty-eight-year-old
guy named Mitch Altman, TV-B-Gone can turn off almost any television,
anywhere. However, it doesn’t seem to be working today on the TV
hanging from the ceiling just ten feet away—or on any of the bar’s
other large, looming monitors. As a result, TV-Was-Still-Here, and I
gave the gadget to the guys to try. It didn’t work for them, either,
but their curiosity was piqued.

“Who would come up with something like this?” asked one, incredulous.

Perhaps, I suggested, an antisocial person who doesn’t approve of
television. “Well, that person shouldn’t be allowed in public,” he
replied.

I asked the guys if they would have been upset if the device had
actually blacked out the beach volleyball game. Even though they’d been
devoting only occasional glances to the game, they agreed that its
sudden absence would have been irksome. “I don’t have this channel at
home,” one of them said.

In another corner of the bar, there was one remaining TV I hadn’t tried
to zap. It was an older model on which a 60 Minutes broadcast had just
started. I walked across the bar casually, keeping TV-B-Gone out of
sight at waist level (shooting from the hip, as it were). I hit the
button, and the TV went dark. No one seemed to notice.
Back in our corner of the bar, the guys cheered. When I sat down again,
they confessed they were beginning to think I’d made up the whole thing
about TV-B-Gone and was just using the gadget to pick up men—a
corollary activity for which it actually seems to work moderately well.
(Though wouldn’t that make it—ahem—a turn-on?)

Rachel, a young woman seated next to me, said, “My ex-boyfriend used to
watch TV in public all the time. Whenever we went out. It’d be just the
two of us and he’d be staring at the TV. I go out to socialize. It
drove me crazy.” She gestured at her Argentine boyfriend, Ozzy. “That’s
why you have to date someone from another country. He doesn’t care,”
she said. Ozzy said he would care if it were a soccer game. “If you
went to a bar in Argentina during a soccer game and shut off the TV,”
he said, “people would go crazy.”

Angering sports fans seems to be one of TV-B-Gone’s easiest and most
cruel amusements. The day before, at Billy’s on Grand in St. Paul, my
friend and I had walked onto the patio, where the bartender and several
of the waitstaff were engrossed in the second game of a Twins-Yankees
series, their backs to the restaurant. I aimed from the hip and one of
the bar’s two outdoor televisions went out. The bartender’s head
snapped around as if someone had fired a shot from the grassy knoll. I
had never seen fury erupt so quickly. He scanned the patio patrons and
the peripheral bushes for snipers (no one ever suspects the blond) and
finally turned the set back on warily.

Seated inside, I turned off the big-screen TV above our table. And
though there were three other televisions still on, a twenty-something
dude nearby screeched, “What the—? Shit!” as his wafer-thin girlfriend
continued nibbling at her salad and baked potato. The waiter scratched
his head and went looking for the remote control.

Inciting public riots, as it turns out, is not the inventor’s
intention. A self-described former television addict, Altman invented
TV-B-Gone in the first place “so I’d have one for me.” For the record,
he never turns off a TV that people are actually watching. Instead, he
says he takes aim at those televisions tucked in the corners of
laundromats and hovering over bar stools, those boob tubes that are
adding only noise or silent yet distracting images to the atmosphere.
“Even people who love television don’t like to have toothpaste sold to
them during dinner,” Altman told me. His original inspiration came
about twelve years ago when he was out with some friends and noticed
that they all, at various times, were distracted from conversation by a
nearby television. Altman admitted that if he’s out in public and a
television is on, “There’s no way I can stop looking at it. We’re all
helpless in the face of it.” He laughed.

TV-B-Gone’s arrival on the market was greeted with a frenzy of media
coverage, and the initial inventory sold out in two days. After almost
a year, people have purchased nearly fifty thousand of the
feather-light zappers. “You could easily go to an electronics store and
buy a universal remote,” said Altman when I asked about any legal
issues regarding “tampering” with private property. “This is just a
little more stealthy.”

Back at Figlio, a very tall man who’d joined our conversation decided
to take matters into his own hands. He got up and turned off the
flat-screen TV the old-fashioned way: by pushing the power button. No
one seemed to notice or care. And though 60 Minutes’ hour was up long
ago, that TV was still dark, too. Something even Andy Rooney might find
amusing.—Shannon Olson