The day my TV started talking to me

Progress. Innovation. Technological wizardry. And — all together now — “Smart TVs.”

Call it what you want, but to me, it’s an evil scam, just another plot to send every person over the age of 60 right back into “The Twilight Zone,” stuck forever inside a snowy black-andwhite television set with a pair of rabbit ears and a coat hanger stuck to the top.

At least I knew how to make those things work — especially if they had knobs, and dials, and those gloriously outdated things called “an on/off switch.”

(Remember those? God bless you. Can I be your friend?)

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’m in the midst of some sort of worldrecord-run right now. I haven’t been able to watch my TV for the past five days, and it’s all because I attempted to do something that, in the words of any of the halfdozen Samsung support people who endured my wrath this week, was a “simple fix.”

As it turns out, something is “simple,” all right. And that something is me, because I’ve never felt more simpleminded in my life than while losing a one-sided battle of wits with my Smart TV.

The trouble began the day my TV started talking to me.

This was nothing I wanted to happened, and it was nothing that had happened in the six months since my stepson — a graduate of Lineman College who’s a lot smarter with Smart TVs than I’ll ever be — so kindly bought the TV for us as a gift. It’s a great TV, and he even set everything up for us; in no time at all, we had an entirely new level of entertainment, up to and including that “streaming” stuff I couldn’t begin to understand just a few months back.

But then, my TV started talking to me.

Technically, it was the “Voice Assistant.” Apparently, it’s for people with an even worse memory than mine who feel the need to have some painstakingly slow robotic voice repeat every single step you just did.

So, you’d try to change the channel to the Giants game, and for the next 15 seconds, you couldn’t hear Krukow or Kuiper because a robotic voice was saying “Channel 6 … 9 … 6 … Major … League … Base … ball … Kansas … City … Royals at San … Francis … co … Giants … “

At first, it was a novelty. In no time at all, it became a major annoyance.

So I set out to fix it. After all, I’d probably somehow caused this to happen; I could also somehow undo it, right?

After a few trials and errors — OK, lots of cussing, yelling and freaking out our normally wellbehaved dogs — I went online and researched “How to get the Voice Assistant to stop talking.”

I followed the directions. Very closely. It didn’t work. I tried again. It didn’t work. I tried turning the TV off, and on again, and then turning the Voice Assistant on and off and then turning the TV off and on again. It still didn’t work, and the Voice Assistant just kept blabbing away, slowly announcing every keystroke I made as my blood pressure shot up accordingly. I even tried unplugging the TV while it was on and turning it back on. It didn’t work.

I had my wife watch me to make sure I was doing all of the steps correctly. I was. It still didn’t work.

Worst of all, it felt like the annoying voice assistant was mocking me. It sounded like every keystroke was met with a “What … are … you … doing? You’ll … never … enjoy … TV … again …. Kansas City Royals at

San Francis .. co … Giants, Channel 6 … 9 … 6 …. Logan Webb, a 6 … foot … 1 … right-hander … from Rock … lin …” each slower than the time before.

(Note: At this point, I’ve wasted probably two hours of my life — and, a good 5 minutes of yours — trying to figure out a fix, with no luck. But stay tuned! This gets worse! MUCH worse!)

I finally tried Samsung’s online chat help. A nice guy named Nick walked me through all of those same steps again. It didn’t work. Next he had me try a “soft reset.” It didn’t work. He did a “live video” thing through my phone so he could watch my every move. It didn’t work.

Then he had me check a bunch of settings. Guess what? None of that worked either.

And then came the big one.

“OK, next go to settings and do a full reset. That’ll restore all of the settings back to the factory settings, and it’ll get rid of the voice assistant,” he said.

“Great!” I said. “Why didn’t we just do that in the first place?”

Well, here’s why.

I did the reset. The TV came back on. And every single thing we had on the TV — from apps to Netflix to DirectTV to Paramount+ to shows we’ve recorded and all of the various favorites we’d saved, with the help of my stepson — was gone.

I expressed my displeasure to Nick, who told me “Oh, you’ll just need to sign back in to your accounts and those things will come back.”

And I said, loosely, “Well, Nick, there’s a problem with that. I didn’t set any of that up. My stepson did. And as a highly busy man who spends a lot of hours climbing towers all over the state every week, he doesn’t exactly have a lot of free time on his hands to drive out to our house and spend several hours trying to undo the damage dear old stepdad did to his TV. Besides, if you’ll remember, all I wanted it to do was SHUT UP so I could actually listen to whatever program I wanted to watch. And now, I can’t watch ANY program! Uh … Nick? Nick? Hello?”

(Loose translation: I don’t know any of the usernames or passwords. Which is probably a good thing. Who could possibly trust me with important stuff like that?)

So for the time being, I’m left with a Smart TV that, to put it bluntly, gets no channels, and is connected to no service, and has nothing on it to watch.

But you know what else I’ve figured out?

As long as it’s not turned on, that means it’s finally stopped talking to me. And in a way, that means I’ve finally fixed the problem.

Who’s the “Smart” one now, Samsung?