Procrastinators rush to get boxes

The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act, which marked the switch from analog to digital television, was announced in 2005.

Yet when the switch took place last Friday, the Federal Communications Commission was smothered with confusion.

They received more than 700,000 calls about converter boxes, the federal coupons to pay for them and reception issues. The procrastination was overwhelming.

As college students, we know a little bit about procrastination. We curse ourselves every time we wind up sitting in front of a computer at 3 a.m. still only halfway through a 10-page research paper we have known about for a couple months.

But when the next semester rolls around we do the same thing all over again.

Apparently this is a habit that dies hard. Americans who have had years to prepare for what is a very simple transition, wait until the day it happens to look into what they have to do to get their basic TV channels.

Rather than listening to the multiple news reports outlining the instructions or going to the FCC Web site, which has detailed directions about everything those who still use antennas need to do, they bombarded them with phone calls.

Many of these customers were probably referred back to the source they should have gone to for consultation in the first place.

According to an Associated Press story, "about a third of the calls were about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes, an indication that at least 100,000 people still didn't have the right equipment to receive digital signals." These coupons have been available since Jan. 1, 2008.

About 30 percent of the calls were about operating the converter boxes and most of those issues were resolved after people re-scanned the airwaves and located the digital signal, according to the story.

About 210,000 phone calls would not have been made if people had simply hit the refresh button.

Luckily, the federal coupons for the converter boxes can still be requested until the end of July and the boxes themselves will be available even longer, but we shouldn't interpret that to mean that our procrastination is justified.

We will make life easier for everyone, including ourselves, when we finally learn that lesson.