About six weeks ago our television gave out. The screen went dark while we were watching a Youtube video, but the sound kept playing. The picture came back on when I turned off the television and then turned it back on, but it happened again about half hour later and I knew it was trouble. The next time we tried to use it, a couple days later, it went off and restarting it did not restore the picture.
I knew it was something in the electronics that had failed. I did some research online, including watching some Youtube videos (on my iPad this time) and determined that it was one of several possibilities, all of which were fixable in principle, by someone with the gumption to find the right part online and replace it by hand. I weighed whether I was up to the task. I decided that it was something I could do if I were determined, but it was require patience in doing it the first time, and it was not the kind of patience I wanted to expend, for this particular task.
The television was seven years old. That was the year of the Sochi Winter Olympics. I enjoyed watching the Olympics back then, and Ginger wanted to watch the opening ceremonies especially, but we had to television set at the time in the apartment where we lived on SW Nebraska in Portland, in the Hillsdale neighborhood.
It so happened that in the run-up to the opening ceremonies, the weather forecast called for a massive snowstorm to hit Portland, which is quite rare. All the time I had lived in Salem going to college, we had gotten only light snow (with obnoxious iciness) a couple times, giving a crust to the grassy lawns of campus that stayed otherwise green all year long. But the Pacific Northwest snowstorm of 2014 was going to wallop us hard, they said.
Our apartment in Hillsdale was in an area of Portland that was hilly, as the name would suggest. Our parking lot was downhill from the road. We thought about getting snowed in. It didn't sound good. The city was going to be a mess for a couple days at least.
That was during the days when living out of hotels was normal for me, and I still had the job at the Big Textbook Publisher writing software remotely for their online textbook publishing platform. So I suggested we check into a nice warm full-service hotel in downtown Portland for a couple days where we could even watch the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Games.
I booked us in the downtown Marriott that is along the waterfront. We drove into their parking garage, keeping our car safe from the elements and checked in. There were few guests in the hotel. They gave us a room with a riverfront facing balcony that looked down over the park. When the snow came, we saw the park turn white with the snow, including the solitary palm tree, which marks almost the northernmost point where such species can grow.
We watched the Sochi opening ceremonies in comfort while ordering room service. After a couple days we checked out and by that time the streets were someone clear. As we approached our apartment we saw the snow heaped on parked cars that were stranded by the drifts. At least the streets were melted slightly, so folks could get out in the near future. But he time we pulled into our spot, the danger zone had passed. We would not get any more snow from the storm.
That apartment felt cold, however, as it was on the first floor with patio doors outside facing north. It had no carpets and the walls sucked in the heat. Moreover it felt too quiet. The Olympics were going on and it would be cozy to watch the coverage.
So I drove out to Beaverton, which is the first suburb across the Portland city limits heading west from Hillsdale, where there was a Best Buy. I went inside and without much thought or researched purchased the smallest LCD set they had, which was about the same cost as a night at the downtown Marriott.
The new set was only twenty-nine inches, the smallest flat screen they sold, I think. I didn't care about having a big television. In fact it was a matter of pride that I could cope with one so small.
t was the first flat screen television I had bought. In 2006 back in Colorado I had purchased my last cathode ray television, which I used to watch Turner Classic Movies for almost two years straight.
It was fun to bring it back to the apartment in its brand new box. I slid it out in its styrofoam jacketing. We had no television stand so we used one of the hardback kitchen chairs in the set that Ginger owned. We didn't want to pay for cable just to watch the Olympics, which were on NBC and thus being broadcast over the air. So I purchased a basic antenna for indoor use, which consisted of a flat white device about ten inches on each side, which would connect to the television by means of a coaxial cable. I had remembered the antennas from the 1970s and this looked nothing like it.
Getting television reception in the apartment turned out to be no small issue. This was despite we could see from our patio to the top of the ridge that separated us from downtown Portland, and upon which sat the various transmission towers of the local Portland network affiliates. I hiked up there to the top regularly. It was a good steep climb.
But somehow we were in a shadow of the transmission. Moreover after the 2009 switchover from analog television signals to digital ones, most of the new digital transmission towers were absurdly lower in the wattage compared to the analog powerhouses that people once depended on to radiate television signals across entire regions of states. Now it was assumed that anyone respectable was using cable. The broadcast signals were an afterthought.
Thus to get the Sochi games I had to resort to dangling the flat white antenna square from a coat hanger that was hung from the rail of the patio blinds. It had to be in just the right angle and position for us to get the local NBC signal. The coaxial cable hung down in a rigid helix to the floor and then crossed the room to where the television was propped on the chair from the kitchen set, now sitting in the living room as the center of focus.
"Russian cable t.v.," I called it, using my best accent.
The television has served us well since then, while we lived in East Portland (where the reception was much better on the third floor of our apartment building on East Burnside) and then in Fountain Hills where we had cable, and where I had TCM again for the first time in years. But we could not use the wall mount that was already installed in the house we rented because it did not accommodate sets of twenty-nine inches but a minimum of thirty-two.
After determining that it was behind my gumption to put fixing the set on my to-do list of projects, I decided to give it one last shot. I called up a television repair guy I found online, who serviced flat screens even by coming to your house. He had an address in North Scottsdale. I left a message and he called me back a couple hours later.
I explained the issue. I told him I had done some diagnostics using a flashlight, as I had seen online. Immediately he dismissed my troubleshooting as meaningless, telling me I probably hadn't done it correctly and thus the information I was providing him was useless. Then when I told him that it was a twenty-nine inch television, he lost his patience entirely. He went into a long-winded build up by telling me what various things would cost and I could tell that he was making the point that it was not worthwhile to fix such a small screen at this point, and that buying a new one would be much more economical.
But he was going to use the phone call as means to make it clear to me that he was insulted that I was wasting his time. As payback for my temerity, he was going to waste my time with a long-winded explanation telling me to get stuffed. Seeing this was where things were headed, I cut him and politely thanked him for his time.
I could tried another place, but I figured the luck of the draw a sign as to what I was supposed to do with it. I immediately begin researching a new set online from the retailers in north Scottsdale. I didn't want to let go of the Beaverton set because it was otherwise perfect for our use. But it's time had passed. I made a resolution that I would inaugurate any new set by loading up a Youtube video of the Sochi games.
No comments:
Post a Comment