Tony

The TV had been messing up for awhile. The kids would complain because their program would glitch and freeze. This glitch would cause the program to jump and skip around, the graphics would be distorted and would cause all around chaos especially if it happened during one of their favorite shows. When this would happen, it would cause my boys, Vincent and Alex,  to harass and annoy one another and both would blame Tony.

“Who is Tony?” I would ask as the annoying whining finally got on my last nerve.

“The man on the TV.” both would chime in.

“Oh right, well tell Tony to cut it out.” I said absentmindedly, more than a half dozen times.

On this one particular day, the wind was quite blustery and the weather cloudy and rainy wreaking havoc with the cable channels. Tony was relentless, garbling every channel and even distorting the sound. This caused the boys to fight and argue even more, and since the weather was bad, their activities were limited to indoors. After first separating my boys from a biting and scratching brouhaha and then again for crashing the wagon into the glass door shattering it. All the while I heard, “Tony made me do it” or “Tony did it!”. After sweeping the glass and closing the front door I finally broke down and called the cable company.

After speaking to the automated operating system and pressing nine several times for the representative, I finally spoke with a ‘living, breathing’ person.

“Thank you for calling Baleful Cable, how can I assist you today?”

“Hello, I’ve been having trouble with my television picture.” I told him.

“I’ll be happy to assist you ma’am, can I verify your name and accounting information?”

After verifying my information, the representative, who actually spoke understandable English wanted a more detailed description of my picture issues.

“It’s garbled, pixelated and very annoying. It’s hard to describe but when Sponge Bob is talking his mouth is on his arm or something like that.”

He chuckled at my description, “that is called tiling. Have you tried rebooting your cable box? He asked me.

“Oh yes, that is the first thing I did.” I assured him.

“Ma’am do you turn your cable box off at night?” he asked.

“Uh, I think so, I turn the whole system off.” I told him, really unsure myself.

“Well tonight leave your cable box on, software updates are done at night, and maybe you are just in need of a software update.”

“Ok, well it figures it would be something so simple.” I replied.

“If that doesn’t fix your problem, please give us a call back and reference your case number and we will send out a technician.” He said as he gave me the case number.

“Thanks!” I replied and hung up the phone.

That night I was sure to leave the cable box on, to hopefully get rid of our ‘tiling’ problem. Putting the boys to bed I asked them, why they called the problem Tony. They said the man was always in the television messing up the picture and described him as being made of iron squares - Iron Man - Tony Stark get it mom? I groaned at the pun as I tucked them in and turned out the light.

The next day as the boys watched a cartoon, there was no tiling, no fighting or arguing so leaving the cable box on all night must have fixed the problem; or at least got rid of it. After an hour of no fighting, I decided to call in a sitter so I could run some errands in town.

I hopped on the train for the thirty minute ride. I saw a lady drop her wallet and instead of telling her about it, I reached out and snatched it and slid it into my bag before anyone could notice. I suddenly felt like someone was watching me and got an uneasy feeling. Instead of waiting for my stop in the city I jumped off the train at the very next station. Imagine my surprise when I saw Tony standing there. Aha, I thought to myself…Tony the pixelated, trouble making, iron man made me do it! Because I normally wouldn’t snatch someone else’s wallet, or would I?

image comes from Reddit user funktasticdog: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2ub17y/unsettling_statue_in_poggibonsi_italy/