A Halloween tale of possessed TV’s

Our TV bagan acting strangely today, which was sort of funny being that it’s Halloween. We were joking that the set was “possessed” (which is not the same as being repossessed). All we could get when we turned on the TV was a screen telling us in a sort of DOS/old video game mode that there were great features on this television set.

My son was calling it “Pac Man Mode” because at one point a graph showed up that looked a bit like a Pac Man game.  We didn’t know how it got into that mode, or how to get it out.  We long ago lost the original remote to this thing. And we bought it used, so we never had an owner’s manual. 

What made things worse was that we couldn’t turn the thing OFF.  You could hit the power button until the cows came home and that demo mode would just continue from screen to screen, oblivious to our frustration.

So the kids got involved. They’re the ones who know how to work the digital cable remote anyway, I have no clue.  They pressed buttons and tried everything and nobody could shut off the thing.  Finally the only solution was to just unplug it.  We hoped that maybe when it was plugged in once more, demo mode would be gone, but that was a vain hope.

Finally I got online and Googled “magnavox tv” and the words “demo mode” came up as alternate search terms. Aha!  That must be what it’s called!  And apparently lots of other people have had this issue because it’s a common search term!

What we discovered was that chasing away the demons from our TV was as easy as simultaneously holding down the volume up and volume down buttons.  And one more time my belief that “the internet is like a library that never closes” was vindicated.