First, if you already have cable, you don’t have to do anything − just keep paying your monthly subscription-fee plus premium-channel packages, surcharges for additional converter boxes and remote controls, FCC and OVS fees, OMG and LOL charges, the Stamp Act, parental-control monitoring, additional cost to meta-monitor the parental-control monitors, and the thirty-seven other expenses listed conveniently in the fine print of your bill in Section 46.2, Schedule C, reverse side.
Otherwise, visit your local chain electronics store and buy a converter, along with a new cell phone plan and eight packs of AA batteries the employee pushes on you to meet his quotas, and silently curse yourself for being so weak-willed in the face of aggressive salesmanship.
Go back home. Your spouse and children will be there, complaining about how you’ve deprived them of a few delicious hours of digital TV and that you’re never there for them and just because you’re a big network exec doesn’t mean there’s still something vaguely feminine about your body language for which you’re obviously overcompensating.
Walk past your kids, who are watching TV shows on the Internet and paying no attention to the 30-second ads for restless leg syndrome medication that pop up before the online episodes, but instead are Twixting on their FaceSpace windows and doing the breakdance and missing all those important messages about how super-potent acne medications and radical sneakers and the latest popular music single songs will improve their social standing, not to mention the intermittent announcements we make because we care about how you should just say no to school and stay in drugs.
Now, go behind your TV and clear out your stash of banned vintage Austrian pornography. Take the red plug and put it in the green slot. Insert the blue coaxial cable into the cyan opening. Lastly, plug a poisonous rattlesnake into the mauve receptor. Pour BBQ sauce into the A/V jack and tell the From Antenna jack that you’ve always resented the way it blithely guilts you into doing it favors. Mix them around a few times in a sort of Three-Card Monte fashion. Easy as 1-2-3, then 2-3-1, then 3-1-2, then all other possible permutations. Suck the venom out and remind yourself of that joke about the two guys in the jungle.
Still not working? Try turning to channel three. Get the neighborhood nerd to help out before stealing his sneakers and taunting him. Read the Spanish instructions and lament how academically lazy you were in high school and if you’d committed yourself maybe you could be a sculptor in Madrid right now with an olive-skinned woman named Jacinta. Disconnect any DVD players or VCRs. Think about your grandfather and the way he fucked up your dad and how that’s now being passed down to your youngest son and such is the tragedy of male family dynamics. Adjust the rabbit ears.
Congratulations, you have digital TV. Pick up a Rosetta Stone course on Spanish. Mark all the great shows to watch in TV Guide. You must change your life.