It’s been a
different kind of week here in the Ashbury household. Something happened last
Sunday that hasn’t actually happened to us in a very long time.
Our television
went on the fritz.
Televisions
used to be considered appliances, did you know that? I can recall the black and
white one we had when I was a kid. Um, for you younger folks, black and white
refers to the colors of the pictures the television produced, not the colors of
the set itself. One day—and seriously, only ever one day that I recall—ours
didn’t work, and my mom had to call the T.V. repair man.
Yes, just like
you might today call a washing machine repair person, or a refrigerator repair
person, you used to be able to call the television repair person.
It was quite
the occasion, in my mind at least. I was just a kid but he let me watch him as
he worked. He unscrewed the back panel of the television (they really were bulky
pieces of furniture in those days). The inside of the beast was filled with one
big picture tube, and several little tubes, elongated glass things with rounded
tops and prongs on the other end. Thinking back, I guess you could liken them to
fuses, because when they “blew” they’d have a black area on them, a sign of burn
out.
Of course, it
didn’t take the repair man long to find the tube that had blown. Fixing it was a
simple matter of exchanging the burned out tube for a new one and then, like
magic, the television worked again.
Well, in 2014
it’s not a television repairperson that gets called—it’s a television
technician. You may recall that my beloved bought this monster set three
years ago, the result of a bargain hunting adventure with our daughter that
still gets recounted at family gatherings. Fortunately, at the time of purchase,
he also bought the four year extended warranty.
Here I will
digress for a moment and tell you, flat out, in as stern a voice as I can
muster, when you buy anything electronic in nature, get the extended warranty if
one is available. We have done that as a regular practice for years, and several
times, collected on it. We have used, for periods of two to three years, and
then received full refunds for a digital camera, a GPS unit, and an expensive
one-cup coffee maker.
Not to mention
that there will be no charge for the “adjustment” to our 54 inch brand name
television. And no, I don’t feel guilty for any of that. Manufacturers don’t
want their products to last forever. If they did, their sales would stagnate.
Much better for them to plan, for example, that they can sell that expensive
one-cup coffeemaker to you every three to five years or so, than to make it so
good it will last ten to fifteen years.
My mother’s
large freezer lasted twenty-seven years, I don’t recall she ever got a new
fridge, and I just inherited her wooden ironing board that I used to iron
clothes on as a teen.
Now, back to
our broken-down television. I called the 1-800 number on the warranty brochure
last Sunday—that is good innovation, call centers that operate 24/7—and after I
recited all the warranty information, the young person on the other end of the
call expressed appropriate sympathy that our television was “down”.
He promised to
send a tech right out to us, and scheduled the service call—for this coming
Friday.
My beloved
gasped when I told him how long we would be without his TV, and looked for one
moment as if his world was about to end. I even knew what question was coming
next: “But what if I had planned to watch something good this
week?”
Really? During
summer re-run season when he only puts on the news, and even that only once or
twice a week? Or catches the occasional episode of that one new series
he’s watching on our cable provider’s “watch on demand” service?
Still, I didn’t
want to seem unsympathetic to his concerns, so I gently stroked his cheek and
said, “Then you can just plan to watch it on your computer, dear.”
This is the
reason it’s been a different kind of week in the Ashbury household. Yes, every
spare moment after dinner he’s been right here, in my office, just two feet away
from me, doing just that.
Thank goodness
for headphones.
Love,
Morgan
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