Please, Pat, don’t hurt ’em
When I was a kid growing up in Nashville, Pat Sajak was, for a short time, the weather guy for our local NBC affiliate. Then Sajak headed off to Hollywood and stardom — well, fame, I guess — doing the job he still has today as the host of “Wheel of Fortune.” Nashville didn’t necessarily miss him. Like LA, the city is a little jaded about would-be and current celebrities. Google, however, thinks the weather guy turned game show host is pretty damn important to one unlucky Redditor who recently shared a weird and frustrating glitch which is alerting him to very important Pat Sajak news several times a day.
On Friday, user AirPhforce wrote, “Google keeps giving me notifications … about Pat Sajak, host of Wheel of Fortune. I have no idea why but it’s happening 3/4 times a day now and I’d like it to stop.” The Redditor followed up with a screengrab illustrating the problem, which was multiple alerts linking stories like this one from Variety, about Sajak defending contestants against trolls.
Sajak has recently been in the news after reacting to the viral tweet above, in which contestants kept whiffing the phrase, “Another feather in your cap.” Thanks to the clip, Twitter briefly turned from world-shaking events to gawk at people who didn’t know what some saw as a ridiculously common saying. The host responded with a tweet of his own.
It was mildly interesting for anyone who pays attention to viral stories — a group that did not include AirPhforce, who added in the Reddit thread that “neither Pat Sajak or Wheel of Fortune” show up as one of their listed Google News interests. Stranger still, the Sajak alerts apparently began prior to the Twitter viral video, as AirPhforce wrote, “I also have no idea why or when it started this but it won’t stop, been two weeks now. I don’t even watch the show!”
Google provides a pretty straightforward solution to problems like this, instructing Android users who don’t want to get any updates about a topic, place, or publication to just open it on your phone, tap “Following,” then “View all and manage,” followed by “More,” which will give you the choice to stop following. Several Redditors offered variations on this solution to AirPhforce, but as of Saturday, nothing was working. Pat Sajak was still lurking in those notifications, haunting him like some living digital ghost.
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