I live next door to the most annoying couple in the world. You may have neighbors you don’t get along with or neighbors that you have no use for, or neighbors with yapping dogs, or undisciplined children, or unkempt lawns. But I assure you, they can’t hold a candle to the Fergusons. What makes the Fergusons such bad neighbors? The Fergusons don’t have television.

No, they’re not Amish. No, they are not living off the grid. No, they are not part of some bizarre behavioral experiment; they are not punishing their children, they are just pretentious snobs who think they are better than everyone else just because they don’t have television.

Oh, they have a TV set and they watch movies on DVD, but they refuse to hook the thing up to cable or even an over-the-air-network. So what’s the problem? Why do I care? It’s their business, live and let live. The problem is they rub my face in it, they bring it up every chance they get.

“Aren’t you sick of all the negative campaign ads,” I might say when we see each other in the driveway.

“No,” he says cheerfully, “We haven’t seen any campaign commercials. Remember, we don’t have TV.”

Like it’s my job to remember they are the one family on the planet that doesn’t have television. They just have to be different. People in poorest China and India can finally get television, but no, not the Fergusons, they’re too good for that.

What he means to say when he says they don’t have television is that they are better than we are. What he means to say is “We don’t smoke television crack, like you weak-willed, pathetic infotainment junkies. We have better things to do with our valuable time than watch game shows and soap operas. We waste our time watching foreign films from Netflix.”

They are so smug.