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Another example of my mother’s dysfunctional relationship with logic: I'd looked up at http://www.digitaluk.co.uk (now Freeview) to see when this address (using the postcode and house number, so I mean for this very house) gets digital TV and, although the switch is not until 2012, it tells me (right there in black and white) that 48 digital TV and radio stations are already available here.
Now I distinctly remember having a very long, slow, "I'll explain this in baby talk" conversation with my mother about this very issue on the phone while I was still living in Tenerife. The reason being that some time before, someone bought her a digital set-top box. This was duly set up by the purchaser and my mother had been telling me on the phone about all the programs that she'd been watching, including, "a whole channel of oldies", unquote. (Gold, probably.)
A little later, there had been a power cut and, presumably, its settings were lost. Obviously, she did not know that it needed to be nor how to reset it. Did she ask someone to look at it? Nope, she just decided that it was not working because, she claimed, digital TV was not in this area yet. Not a logical deduction.
So, speaking very, very slowly, I asked her if she remembered telling me about the "whole channel of oldies". No reply. Silence. Avoidance. So, I TOLD her that she had been telling me about a "whole channel of oldies" and asked her to confirm that she thus had to have seen the "whole channel of oldies" with her own eyes.
She still AVOIDED responding directly, merely snapping back in a nasty, sarcastic tone, "probably". So I told her that this meant, therefore, no matter what she was being told (she'd then claimed she'd been told by someone that digital was not yet in the area), that digital had to be available, because she had seen it with her own eyes. She still wouldn't hear it and returned the gift as "useless."
She could have returned it, honestly, as a pain in the neck if it needed constant resetting. She's not actually stupid. She could follow the logic. She just thought only she found it difficult and she could not admit to finding anything difficult, so she had to invent all these other ridiculous reasons that weren't her fault.
When I got to the UK and confirmed the above details by looking them up, she claimed to be "fully aware" (as if she'd always been) that digital IS available here and vehemently denied having ever having said that it wasn't. Sh*t, she'd insisted, over and over, that it wasn't available and I'd had to go through the "but you've seen it with your own eyes" business over and over and over trying to get her to realise she was talking through her arse. And I, absolutely, categorically, could not EVER forget that particularly bloody difficult, nasty conversation, verbatim.
Now the "new" reason the digital box was returned, she informs me, is because it was not compatible with her TV set. Hold on a f*cking minute ... Didn't she tell me about seeing the "whole channel of oldies". So it was compatible then?
