The Pink Screen of Disaster

There are a lot of malfunction screens that I have seen in my time. There is the blue screen of death most associated with Windows, especially Windows 98.




There are the snowy screens and black screens announcing a lack of signal. There is the screen that has multi colored bars signaling that a station is off the air.



But yesterday, I got a new one – the pink screen. It wasn’t just any pink, it was hot pink. At first I thought it was a tribute to Breast Cancer Awareness. But then I thought, “Why would ABC have a symbolic tribute instead of showing the Euro 2008 final?” That’s right, I didn’t see a second of the championship game! All I saw was a pink screen for 2 hours!! For the last hour of coverage it showed the following:

Very helpful. Now I know watching soccer is not big here in America (though playing it seems to be on the rise among kids). But this was the perfect opportunity to showcase good teams for Americans to see. The only competition was the Women’s US Open golf tournament, some men’s golf tournament that the casual golf fan would not care about, and PBA bowling. Yesterday was the day to broadcast a soccer game, and they blew it. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what the Pink Screen of Disaster (as I am calling it) came up, but it did. And I don’t know the extent of the malfunction, whether it was just DISH network, or just East Tennessee, or all of America, but I missed the game and I was pissed. And trying to put a soothing pink color on the screen did not help me from seeing red.



PS – if you haven’t seen it, or even if you have, here’s the infamous video of Bill Gates experiencing the “Blue Screen of Death”