TV 101: Ways to make hotel TV viewing better

So, this feature has been gone a long long time. If you're one of my nearly four or so fans, you've probably been beside yourself with grief.

Well grieve yourselves no longer. TV 101 is back from its long hiatus.

Where was I? Well, my college stand-up tour this spring was a little more successful than I (or my agent or my wife or any of my friends) could have possibly predicted and I spent the last four months getting an intimate tour of every medium-priced hotel in the Midwest.

As a traveler and TV watcher, I've returned from my road-trip with some observations about what hotels can do to make our lives (as television viewers) a bit nicer...

I'm a gadget geek. Seriously, if our sister blog, Engadget, were to spontaneously gain sentience a la Skynet, I'd gladly live in the world it creates for us (incidentally, I have a strong feeling that world would look a lot like Tokyo). Why then, you might ask, don't I have a Slingbox to bring my TV with me and thus negate the 1000 words of complaint that are about to spill out of my fingers?

Because Hotel WiFi is as unreliable as Chinese pet food (note to my editors: when TV 101 is eventually turned into a book, this joke might need a footnote). If I were performing in big cities consistently, I might expect to find a strong signal. Since most of the places I went to this spring were in tiny little college towns where the term "broadband" refers more to "Josie and the Pussycats" than it does to high speed internet, I decided to hold off spending money on yet another box to plug into my television.

Until then, I had to go with whatever TV the hotel offered. While I don't expect every hotel room in America to be equipped with a 42" HDTV plasma, I do think there's a certain bare minimum hotels can do to make our stay a bit more pleasant.

1. Give us an accurate channel listing. It doesn't have to be elaborate, just a laminated list of all the channels your hotel offers with the station number next to it.

There is absolutely nothing worse than coming into a new town, settling in to find your favorite show, and not being able to find the channel. Well, I suppose things like death and famine are worse, but I'm talking about from an American Consumer perspective.

Clicking is fine when you're not looking for something in particular, but when you're trying to find a specific show, it can be maddening. This is especially true when you decide to stop on a channel that's currently in commercial because something in your gut tells you that, yes, this is the right channel, and that when it comes out of commercial the show you're looking for will be right there for you. But when you're expecting PTI and you get Saved by the Bell... I can only imagine this is what it feels like for a woman in her late twenties when she invests months and months on a man only to find out that he's "not interested in a commitment" or "likes to dress as a baby and have her 'change' him" or whatever.

And by the way, a note to all the hotels that decided the answer to this problem was not getting a ten cent photocopied sheet but rather paying some slack-jawed clerk to program the TV so that the name of the channel comes up along with its number: CABLE SYSTEMS HAVE CHANGED THEIR CHANNEL LINEUP SINCE 1997! You have a better chance of getting a friendly, happy-go-lucky airline clerk than you do a TV that has even 10% of its channels correctly labeled. Go with the photocopy. Please.

2. Invest in a cable system that has more than 20 channels. 50 is the bare minimum in this day and age and, really, if I don't see the channel number creeping up past 70, I'm starting to feel like it's the late nineties.

While I'd love to break out my Hanson concert t-shirt again, I'd much rather live in a world that showers me with not just Fox News, but also CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Headline News, and Bloomberg. Sometimes I wake up with a hankering for crazy liberal nonsense and sometimes I wake up with a yearning for Orwell-esque conservative misinformation. And sometimes I just want to have thirty things crawling across my screen at the same time without being able to understand any of it (I'm looking at you Bloomberg). The thing is, I need the choice!

I don't know what the economics are regarding hotel channel purchases, but I think enough Americans have 100+ channels in their homes that putting the money into buying extra channels is a necessity. I react to the 20 channel hotels like I do to the hotels that provide you with shampoo but not conditioner: with anguished howling at the top of my lungs. Well, no, not really, but come on! Not having a reasonable amount of channels makes the hotel look like your cheap aunt who bought you MegaBlocks instead of LEGOs. Would it really have killed her to pay the extra 16 cents so that the other kids didn't take apart my buildings and peg me with the blocks?

(And by the way, my father's logic that they would have done that regardless of whether I had LEGOs or anything else doesn't count here. If you can go just a little bit extra to make everyone happy, then you should.)

3. Get remote controls that a) work and b) have batteries. I cannot stress this enough. Remotes are a non-negotiable. If I have to spend more than 12 hours in Mid-Central Missouri, then, by God, I'm not going to get up every two seconds to change the channel!

Hotels: you have maids. Instruct those maids to every once and a while check the batteries in the remotes and then try turning the TV on and off. It's not that hard.

Oh, and while you're at it, tell them that every 3 months or so they should take the bedspreads and burn them. Seriously.

4. Stop putting out that little HBO booklet that every subscriber used to get back in the 80s. The only reason to put out that little booklet is to brag to the world: "Hey look at me! I have HBO!" That stopped being brag-worthy about 1987. Putting it on every TV in every room is like walking up to a girl at a bar and saying, "Do you like my pants? I've got two words for you: Bugle Boy. I'll be waiting for you out in my Fiero."

5. That being said, you can't call yourself a hotel anymore unless you HAVE HBO. A few hotels this year, I've noticed, have tried going with only Showtime as their pay channel. I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Even though Showtime is the home to the only TV show that I've so far appeared on (NSFW), you can't call yourself a full-service hotel unless you offer HBO. I'm not saying that Showtime can't be offered as a tasty side-dish, but HBO needs to be the main meal.

(And yes, I'm saying this despite what HBO subjected me to this week with Vito Jr's goth poop on the Sopranos. If I have to watch any more chubby plunkers, I'm rewriting the above paragraph in favor of Showtime).

6. Make sure the cable to each room is sufficiently powered. At my house, the upstairs TVs were a little bit fuzzy. I called the cable company and they came out to my house and told me: "Oh, the power is a little low. We'll boost the power." And you know what happened? They actually boosted the power! Then, my TVs weren't fuzzy anymore.

I hate the cable companies as much as anyone else. They overcharge, they defend their monopoly like they were a 19th century robber-baron, and I'm pretty sure that they'll demand my first born (I'm not 100% decided if I'm going to give him up, though -- it really depends on how next season's new shows are shaping up). But if even they can actually fix the problem of fuzzy TVs with little to no fuss, then there is no excuse on the planet why any hotel room in the country should suffer from low-power fuzziness.

7. I don't have a number seven, just a predilection for prime numbers. I will use this opportunity, however, to turn it over to you: what bugs you about watching TV on the road? Let me know in the comments.

And finally, now that I'm off the road for a long stretch, I'm going to be doing these TV 101 columns much more regularly. My goal is once a week. As Superman said at the end of Superman II: Sorry I've been away so long. I won't let you down again.

(It should be noted at this point, I got up from my computer, grabbed an American flag and flew into space.)

(It should also be noted that there's a chance I might have delusional schizophrenia.)