Where is everyone from?

[wa2ise]

I'm from New Jersey, just outside New York City (14 miles directly north of the Empire State Building, old and current home of NYC's TV stations). If not for the trees I could SEE the Empire State Building from here.

When I was a young kid, my family never traveled outside the NYC metro area, and thus never saw any TV stations on channels 3, 6, 8, 10 or 12. And as the networks were based in NYC, and CBS was on WCBSTV2, NBC on WNBCTV4 and ABC on WABCTV7 and they said that they did nationwide broadcasting, I took it to mean that these TV stations covered the entire country. But then why the empty channels? At the time I was in early grammar school, where we had to do lots of pointless things like memorize poems and such. I figured that the government made the TV makers add the empty channels on the dials of TV sets for no other reason than that the government could make them do it. Just like the teachers made you do stuff in school. Why should adult life be any different?....