A Gen X memory about turning the TV taught me everything about what we ask disabled people to do, and what the field is too quiet about.
By Precious “Preciosa” Myers-Brown, the Voice of Enabling Technology™
Let me take you back.
I am a Gen X kid in New York City. The TV in our apartment had a turn dial. Two of them, actually. The bottom dial got you channels two through thirteen, and if you wanted anything above that, you had to twist the top dial to U and then use the bottom knob to hunt for whatever was up there. There were no remotes yet. When remotes finally showed up, they came with the cable box, and they only worked on cable channels. If you wanted to watch regular TV without getting up, you got up.
We had thirteen channels and half of them were filled with snow because of how the antenna was sitting. You learned to walk over and adjust it, sometimes with foil, sometimes by holding it just so until somebody else in the room agreed the picture had cleared. Watching TV was a small act of negotiation that my generation accepted as just how the world worked. Kids today, no matter how many times I explain it, would not be able to picture it even if I told them the same story a thousand times.
We were outside kids. We were always outside. Inside was where you got in trouble for arriving late to. Outside was the whole world. Double dutch in the street, hopscotch on the sidewalk, kickball, flies up, handball against the wall, riding our bikes, roller skating, dancing on the corner. We never went inside. Ever. So when my mother needed something from me, she did not call me. She could not call me. There were no cell phones. We had yelling out windows and we had each other.
She would call my cousin sitting on the stoop. Not on the phone. Yell to my cousin. My cousin would tell another friend. That friend would tell another. The message would relay person to person to person across blocks and blocks and blocks of the city, more reliable than any text message I have ever sent in my life, until somebody finally found me wherever I was. And I might be really far. I might be on my bike a few blocks over. I might be at my friend’s house a few more blocks past that. I might be on skates somewhere I had not even told anybody I was going. They would find me. They always found me. They would say, your mother is calling you. I would say, what does she want? They would say, I do not know, you have to go.
And I would go. All the way back home. Blocks and blocks and blocks. On foot, on bike, on skates, whatever I had under me. I would walk in, find her in her spot, and say yes. Because in my house you did not say “what” to an adult, especially not to my mother. That is not how I came out, and that is not how I would have stayed in one piece either. So I said yes.
She would look at me and say, turn the TV.
That was the whole reason. Turn the channel.
Young Precious was furious. I had been in the middle of double dutch. I had been in the middle of hopscotch. I had been in the middle of kickball. I had been in the middle of flies up. I had been in the middle of doing something. She had pulled a whole human relay system across multiple blocks of New York to get me home so I could walk three feet across our living room and turn a knob.
Now here is the part nobody talks about
My mother did not have a disability. But she waited.
I do not know how long she waited. I do not know what time she sent the first message, how long it took the first person to find the second, how long the chain was before somebody finally found me, how long I took to get home. Hours, maybe. To turn a TV.
If that scene happened in 2026, no one would accept it. Get up. Use the remote. Tell Alexa. Use your phone. Do anything but make a child stop playing in the street because you wanted to change the channel.
And yet, every day, in our field, we run a version of that exact scene. We just do not see it.
Sit with me for a second
If I had communication challenges, and on top of that I had physical challenges where I could not even point to what I wanted, how would I tell someone that I want to surf the TV?
Try to actually sit in that question. Not watch a specific show. Surf. Flip and flip and flip until something looks interesting. The whole point of surfing is that you do not know in advance what you want. You are going to know it when you see it.
To do that without speech, without the ability to point, without a reliable way to indicate yes and no in real time, I would first have to invent a way to tell my staff person that I want to surf at all. I would have to do that with a staff person who may or may not understand my communication style. Then I would have to invent a way to tell them, at the speed surfing actually happens, when something catches my interest. And I would have to hope that the person on the other end is willing to stand there flipping through 200 or 300 channels with me, possibly for an hour, while I hunt for the thing I cannot describe in advance because I do not know what it is yet.
The person we support, the one we have decided needs the most help, is the one we are asking to perform the most communication labor in the entire room. They have to have more skill than the staff person turning the TV. They have to know in advance what they want, in a situation that by definition does not work that way.
That is not support. That is a tax we put on disability for the privilege of doing what every able-bodied person does without thinking.
What “too complicated” actually means
Here is the part that broke me into writing this book.
We have normalized the most impossible situations and we treat them as if they are the right way of doing things. We accept the relay system. We accept the waiting. We accept asking the person with the disability to perform feats of communication their staff could not match. We have agreed, as a field, that this is care.
But the moment someone proposes a solution that would eliminate any of it, a smart TV, a voice-controlled remote, a tablet with picture-based selection, a simple universal remote that any cousin in the family could program in twenty minutes, the solution becomes the most challenging thing for us to implement or approve.
Too complicated, we say. The person cannot handle the technology, we say. We need a doctor’s order, some of us say, before someone can have help learning to surf the channel.
A doctor’s order. To watch TV.
Read that one more time and tell me where the complicated part is, because it is not the technology.
Why I wrote Tech Equity
I called this article “Breaking the Cost of Silence” because the cost of silence is not only personal. It is the field’s silence too.
For a long time, the cost of staying quiet was lower than the cost of speaking up. You learn that early in this work. You learn which meetings require a smile and which committees punish honesty. You learn what gets you a seat at the table and what gets you uninvited. So you stay quiet and you make the system work for the people in front of you, one workaround at a time.
But silence has a price. Every year of silence is another year someone waits for the channel to be turned. Another year someone is told they are too complicated. Another year a regulator requires a doctor’s order to authorize something the rest of the world handles with a forty-dollar device. Another year the field calls itself person-centered while it asks the person at the center to perform impossible communication so we do not have to change.
I wrote Tech Equity because the cost of staying quiet finally got higher than the cost of speaking up. And once it does, you cannot unsee it. You cannot sit in another meeting hearing the word “complicated” applied to the wrong thing and pretend you did not hear it.
This book is the receipt. It is the language for what we are building, the proof that the impossible is not impossible, and the call to stop making the people we serve wait by the window for somebody to come turn the TV.
We can do better. We have always known how. We have just been too quiet about it.
This article is original to techequitybook.com and builds on themes from Chapter 1: The New Normal of Care of Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology by Precious “Preciosa” Myers-Brown, published by House of CINO. Available now in paperback, hardcover, and ebook at techequitybook.com/get-the-book.
