The Story from American Public Media

A Life Unplugged

Friday, February 02 2007 | Send to a friend

A Life Unplugged

Steve DeJoseph

More than 100 million people in the United States are expected to tune in to Super Bowl XLI on Sunday. Many of them will be watching the game on brand new big-screen television sets.

Steve DeJoseph will not be one of them. Over 20 years ago, he was watching a basketball playoff game on TV.  His wife nagged him, telling him that the athletes he was watching didn't care about him. So Steve unplugged the TV, took it to the driveway and sold it.

When I told her I sold the TV, my wife says, "You couldn't have." And she just has this stunned look.  I said "Go look." There's 10 seconds of just… dead silence. And all of a sudden I hear, "Oh my God! He sold the television!"
- Steve DeJoseph

The DeJoseph Family

Steve talks to Dick Gordon about stories from his TV-less life, like getting the cold shoulder from neighbors, and reading 3,000 books in ten years.

When his daughters reached high school, though, they demanded a vote to restore the TV. The vote was 4-1. Bet you can't guess the outcome.

• Read the lyrics and listen to the original "Superbowl Shuffle"
  
• Watch the full superbowl videos Dick references, "Da Superfan" and "Peyton's Paradise"
  
• Explore Steve's online chess club
  
• Play these "screen-free" activities for kids
  

Add to story

Tough Jobs - Carrie Bayer, Mortician

Few of us like to confront the fact of our own mortality, yet alone make it the basis of our daily work.

Carrie Bayer

We are often so uncomfortable with the very idea of death that we want nothing to do with it. But Carrie Bayer works with dead people every day. She's a mortician in California.

Carrie didn't plan this career. It was something she thought she could do when she attended the funeral of a relative, and found they weren't doing a good job of it.

It didn't run very smoothly.  And at the graveside service, the funeral director was calling over the back hoe before we were even done praying… and we could hear the engine idling.  It just ruined the moment, and it was very impersonal.  I felt like we were just another case for them that day.
- Carrie Bayer