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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Those TVs in elevators and fuel pumps are evil. You can look away from the screen but the voices make it hard to think.

The ones in fuel pumps are the worst. In my town I make a point of avoiding any gas station that has sunk to that level, but they seem to be harder and harder to avoid especially when traveling.

YMMV but at least here in the southeast USA, the default GSTV signal can be turned off by pressing a combination on the 4 soft touch keys on the outside of the screen. If your buttons are like so,

1 | CONTENT | 5

2 | CONTENT | 6

3 | CONTENT | 7

4 | CONTENT | 8

try the sequence 5 6 5 . Here where I am at, that mutes the sound. Sometimes 7 8 7 also turns the screen off.

But! You need to put it back to screen on, sound on, or the staff will notice and you risk them changing the combination on you.

Around here it seems like I just have to push one button to turn the sound off. Presumably it comes back for the next customer but I have no idea.

The elevator ones I’ve seen are mostly silent, they just have a cycling static display. The gas station ones are a fucking abomination though.

Some of these can be muted by pressing one of the buttons, they're just not always labeled.

At the gas station I frequent, there are buttons around the periphery of the screen. One of these mutes the audio, making the necessity of refilling gas at least a little less unpleasant.

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