Jim Mullen

I live next door to the most annoying couple in the world. You may have neighbors you don’t get along with or neighbors that you have no use for, or neighbors with yapping dogs, or undisciplined children, or unkempt lawns. But they can’t hold a candle to the Fergusons. What makes the Fergusons such bad neighbors? The Fergusons don’t have television. No, they’re not Amish. They are just pretentious snobs who think they are better than everyone else just because they don’t have television. Oh, they have a TV set and they watch movies on DVD, but they refuse to hook the thing up to cable or even an over-the-air-network. So what’s the problem? It’s their business, live and let live. The problem is they rub my face in it.

“Aren’t you sick of all the negative campaign ads,” I might say when we see each other in the driveway.

“No,” he says cheerfully, “We haven’t seen any campaign commercials. Remember, we don’t have TV.”

Like it’s my job to remember they are the one family on the planet that doesn’t have television. People in poorest China and India can finally get television, but no, not the Fergusons, they’re too good for that. What he means to say when he says they don’t have television is that they are better than we are. What he means to say is, “We don’t smoke television crack, like you weak-willed, pathetic infotainment junkies. We have better things to do with our valuable time than watch game shows and soap operas. We waste our time watching foreign films from Netflix.”

If I can’t remember that they don’t have television, what are the chances I’ll remember that Beverly Ferguson is allergic to bell peppers? Too late I remembered I had put green peppers in the coleslaw. Shouldn’t it have been Beverly’s responsibility to know it’s normal to put a little green pepper in coleslaw? If she watched all the cooking shows on television she might have known that. Sure enough, she exploded like one of those contestants on “Fear Factor” after eating only half of a giant, rancid slug. She could have tossed her salad on her side of the fence, but no, she spewed like Old Faithful all over ours. I don’t know what she had for breakfast but now it was all over our rose bushes. Worse, the Fergusons didn’t even offer to help clean up the mess. Don’t people without television have any manners? A few afternoons of watching Dr. Phil might do the Fergusons a world of good.

Because they don’t have television they haven’t even heard that on Feb. 19, 2009, that all TV sets, even the one in their house that they don’t watch, will explode killing everyone within a two-mile radius leaving a fatal radiation hot spot for tens of thousands of years to come. I’m sorry, what? You just won’t get a signal? And that’s only if your TV set is so old you’re still getting your TV signal from rabbit ears? If a snowy screen is the worst that can happen, why are they running all these announcements 500 times a day like it’s going to be the end of the entire world?

“I wouldn’t know,” said Bob Ferguson, “Remember, we don’t watch TV.”

I do remember. I’m just hoping they don’t read the newspaper, either.

Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life” and “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at jim_mullen@myway.com

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