“Stop whining, A little hard work won’t kill you.”

Today is the 3rd anniversary of my dad’s passing. I have been busy and not writing much, but here is another good memory.

My Dad didn’t put up with any shit. He had a high standard for quality of work for himself and for others. And he was not afraid to tell you about it. If he went to a restaurant and had bad service he wasn’t afraid to complain. If he bought a product or service and it was beneath his standards, he would not pay. If you half-assed it on the hockey rink or the baseball field, you sat on the bench. And he would not forget a restaurant, a company or a player who did not deliver.

So, in the 1970’s everyone was getting Cable TV. Before cable TV, you got your TV signal by putting an antenna on your roof. An antenna worked ok, but in bad weather, channel reception was pretty fuzzy or snowy. My Dad was an early adopter of new technologies and we were one of the first to sign up for CableTV. But all the kinks weren’t worked out and there were some problems. So my Dad wouldn’t pay the bill and the cable company cut us off. They were trying to collect from him and he was refusing to pay and writing letters on his IBM Selectric typewriter. So, suffice it to say, Cable TV became a non-option in our house, just as all my friends were getting more channels and clear reception.

My dad then installed another technology to upgrade the antenna performance and to ensure he would never have to pay the cable company — an antenna rotor. It was technology where you had a box on top of the TV with an adjustable circular dial. The box was connected by wire to the motor on the roof of your house that “rotated the antenna ‘’ towards the tv signal that you wanted to receive. This was crucial where we lived because half our TV signals came from Toronto (Canadian Channels) and half from Buffalo (American channels). In bad weather to get good reception on the Toronto channels, you had to point the antenna to the north-northeast and to get Buffalo to the southeast.

To be fair, this was a marginal inconvenience. If you change the channel from a Toronto to a Buffalo channel, you had to get off the couch and change the antenna direction. And it was not an inconvenience at all for my Dad, since he made the kids get up and change it. He thought he had beat the cable company.

But the motor on the roof of the house to move the antenna was not very reliable. In a Canadain winter, it was really unreliable. Despite many motor replacements and repairs we just could not get it to work.

That’s when things got insane. Instead of paying the cable company and getting back on cable. My dad decided we would just manually adjust the antenna. He put a ladder in the back yard that permanently leaned against the house. In bad weather, changing the channel was a three-man job, one person watched the TV and yelled to a person who was standing in the back basement door, who yelled at the person who had climbed on the roof to move the antenna manually. It was comical for everyone except the person on the roof. Here was a typical set of yelled instructions: “Turn it a little more counterclockwise. No, wait, back a bit!. That’s good. No, wait, forward a little more. Just a little bit more. Hang on, I think that’s good. Give it a minute. Ok, one more click back. We are good!”

Please remember this was only needed when the weather was bad and that often meant the Canadian winter. You had to put on boots, a coat, gloves, and a toque. There was snow and ice on the roof and it was windy.

We pleaded with my dad that this was “too much work”. We tried to get my Mom to tell him it was perilous and that someone would eventually fall off the roof. Couldn’t we just “give in” to the cable company, pay the bill and stop the antenna rotational madness?

But he would not give in. “F*ck them, I am not paying. Stop whining, a little hard work won’t kill you. You are too soft as it is.”

That was my Dad. Missing him always, but more so today.