I was never a General Hospital fan. But I did get hooked on a different soap, The Young and the Restless, also known as Y&R (or The Hot and the Horny). Here's how. I was in grad school at Georgia Tech in electrical engineering from 1978 to 1981. To pay my bills I had a job at the computer center. When I entered the research phase of my degree, I usually got to the computer center at 4 pm, worked until midnight, and then waited for the computer center to clear out at 2 am when I could get dedicated computer time to run my simulations of noisy channel coding, the topic of my research. At dawn I finished my work, drove home, and went to sleep. I woke up at 1 pm and repeated the cycle. And when I ate breakfast in the early afternoon, the main program on TV was Y&R.
Eventually I left grad school and my hours became conventional again, bringing an end to my Y&R days. In the 35 years since, some Y&R characters have come in and out of the storyline. Some of the actors, too. Many of the fundamentals remain, though. I watch almost no episodic television these days, but when I flip channels and run across Y&R, parts of it look familiar — triggering memories of a time for me that was occasionally happy, often not… like the Y&R storyline itself.
