The Slice: In Badgett apartment, request line is always open

Here is today’s tale of gadget confusion.

This happened some time ago, but the story illustrates this theme.

At Richard Badgett’s retirement community, there is a separate in-house phone system. Everyone has a three-digit number.

One day he answered the in-house phone in his apartment. A woman on the line asked him if he would switch her TV to channel 115 so she could watch a certain basketball game.

What the…?

“I told the lady ‘Sorry,’ but she must have the wrong phone number and hung up,” said Badgett.

A few moments later, the in-house phone rang again. Badgett’s wife answered.

She figured out the nature of the confusion.

It seems the caller’s daughter had phoned her and suggested she switch her TV to channel 115. The woman then mistakenly picked up her in-house phone and punched in 1-1-5. That rang the Badgett’s residence, apartment No. 115.

The poor soul making the call apparently did not connect with the fact that most TV remotes do not work on a verbal-request basis. She just knew she wanted her TV on channel 115.

The Badgetts got her apartment number and went to assist her.

“My wife and I later agreed that she sure got results, regardless of how she did it.”

Slice answer: When Jim Perry wants to get the attention of someone listening to headphones he flips the overhead lights off and on.

Cleared for takeoff: Longtime correspondent Mike Storms mailed me a paper airplane that flew pretty well.

This date in Slice history (2007): Today’s typos: High school teacher Linda Martin was showing students how to graph parabolas. In the course of her explanation, she found herself writing “horizontal shift” on the chalk board.

It wasn’t until after her students started laughing that she realized she had left a letter out of “shift.”

Jacqueline Volz once helped her husband, a teacher, prepare a history test. She did the typing.

The next day, the students got a kick out of a question that sought explanations for one country’s “low standard of loving.”

Maybe it has something to do with horizontal shift.

Today’s Slice question: How was your first quarter?