Closed Captioning

I thought closed caption TV was for the hearing impaired or anyone watching Derry Girls.  I was wrong.  Unless you count me and all the people I know over the age of 60 as hearing impaired.  Which does have some truth if we are defining hearing impaired as needing the TV at 70 on the volume scale to hear it.

My BFF Kathy and I were having a text conversation on this the other day.  We were chatting about a TV series we both like, The Empress.  She commented that she thought the dubbing (it’s in German) would be annoying but the closed captioning eliminated that problem. 

Me: Closed captioning? You watch tv regularly with closed captioning?

Kathy: Yes, always.  My girls got me hooked.

I didn’t follow up on that, but was quite curious because her girls are in their late twenties and early thirties.  Young people watching TV with closed captioning? Is this some new trend? What? Why? When? How?

Kathy: Conversely, Mike (husband) hates it but needs to turn the volume up to 75.  And he still misses dialog so then we have to rewind and I’m like, ‘how about we try closed captioning?’

I can count on one hand the number of times I have chosen to use the closed captioning.  The aforementioned Derry Girls series for starters.  They were talking English. I should have been able to understand them.  I am familiar with the Irish brogue, having lived in Boston for 5 years.  But they could have been talking Chinese for all I could understand them. I was quite proud of myself though. By the third season I had a breakthrough and was able to crack the code such that I could understand maybe 75% of what was being said. Good to know that if I ever make it to Ireland I will need Google Translate.

The only other time I used closed captioning was to watch the Korean film, Parasite.  I mean, that is pretty much a given.  Any foreign film requires closed captioning.  Perhaps that is why I don’t watch many foreign films.

In other words, I only use closed captioning if I absolutely have to.  It’s not something I choose to do on a regular basis.  I am like Kathy’s husband Mike.  Just turn up the volume.

As I said to Kathy, I prefer to watch my TV, not read my TV.  I find that with closed captioning I am not watching what is on the screen.  I am reading those words down at the bottom.  The images on the screen are more like on the periphery of my vision, so I feel like I am missing something visually.

But Kathy is not alone in this, I know.  My sister uses closed captioning all the time too. When I am over her house, she’s like, “you don’t mind if we watch this with closed captioning, do you?”.  Umm, yes? She’s a sport.  So we’ll start out without it.  But very quickly, she’s like, “let’s put it on.”

The issue is, you got it, aging.  It all comes around to that eventually.  This is why I was perplexed that Kathy’s young daughters are using it.  Could there be some other reason I am missing?  I can’t speak to that, but I can for us over the age of 60.

Even if you can pass a hearing test and don’t require a hearing aid (I did and I don’t), somehow or other, the television volume needs to be higher.  My theory is that there is some inverse proportion thing happening between us and our TV’s.  As you get older, your TV sound gets lower. These TV’s are so smart these days.   Maybe they just wanna mess with us.  I can imagine the three sets we have in our house having a conversation. “Look, when she was 35 she had no problem with the volume at 17.  Let’s mess with her.  She’s 61 now.  Let’s retune ourselves so that 17 volume level is now equal to 70.”  It’s a conspiracy. Told you in a previous blog post, these machines are going to take over.

Then, to really up the fun factor, they decide to crank the volume when the commercials come on.  I can see them now, laughing to each other, “OMG you should have seen her jump! So, I got her watching the show at 70, commercial comes on and it’s like 85.  She nearly had a coronary!”

So now, annoyingly, I have to have the remote handy whenever I am watching TV so that I can either soft mute or total mute during the commercials.  Annoying.

Also annoying, but also panic-inducing is when I either have to put on the closed captioning, or somehow the closed captioning is on and I want it off (TV messing with me again).  I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS.  Or, I think I know how, but I can’t seem to do it.  I am pushing buttons on the remote, paging up, down, sideways, searching, searching, searching.  Where is the closed captioning? 

The first time I encountered this, I turned to google for assistance.  Typed in “how to turn on and off closed captioning.” 

Ok, it says to pause the program.  In the far right, lower corn there will be a cc.  Click on that.

That sounded easy enough.  I paused the program.  I saw the cc.  But I couldn’t seem to operate the remote cursor to get there.  Once again, I am trying every button on the remote to get it over to that cc. I end up either restarting the show or exiting the show.  Everything but getting to the elusive cc icon.  Finally, by some kind of luck, after much angsting and pushing of buttons, I did it.  I got the damn cursor over to the damn cc icon.  Turned the damn cc on or off, whichever was required in that moment.

You would think, having done this a few times now, I know what I am doing.  Nope.  I go through this angst every time I need to turn on or off the closed captioning.

To close caption or not to close caption.  That is the question.  And also, what is up with those smart TV’s?