In the long list of life’s little annoyances, one of the most aggravating is having the television go out. I have just gone through the tunnel of darkness at my house with a non-working television. I don’t watch television that much, but my honey lives in front of it.

One night the television was working just fine, the next morning “poof” no picture. The aggravation was greatly amplified by the fact that it is one of those large-screen monstrosities that men are so fond of and women hate with a fury.

Honey clicked remote control buttons frantically, thinking it must be something that needed to be re-set. It was no use. The sound was fine, but the screen was as black as the backside of the moon. Like all electronic and mechanical gadgets, it lasted just long enough for the warranty to expire.

“It doesn’t work! I have to get it fixed! Who can I call?”

“Try the place where you bought it,” I suggested.

We couldn’t remember the name of the store. We looked in the Yellow Pages and couldn’t find anything that sounded right. Honey dug through his old receipts, which was much like looking for a lost lottery ticket in the dumpster.

Finally, he said, “I know where the store is – I’ll just go by there tomorrow.” It was on the other side of town, but I didn’t have any better suggestion. He left early the next morning, a man with a mission. When he returned hours later, he said they told him to take two tranquilizers and call them back on Monday when the technician was in.

He was intolerably depressed with no buttons to push all weekend. “Why don’t we put the one from the bedroom in here till it’s fixed?” I asked foolishly.

“It’s too much trouble. I’ll have to disconnect it and move the cable.”

That didn’t seem like much work to me, but I figured I’d better just leave it alone. “Maybe you can watch it in the bedroom then?”

“I’m not ready to go to bed yet,” he growled.

Although the store had said that plasma screen monitors never have problems, the technician was fully booked and could not come for several more days. So, honey “listened” to TV, stared at the empty screen, and brooded.

Being female, I just couldn’t seem to comprehend the magnitude of his despair. He actually tried to blame me for the problem, saying it was because I used the button on the TV to turn it off instead of the remote control. I was beginning to get highly annoyed at this point and assured him emphatically that I would never touch the thing again, not even to turn it off, even if it played all day and all night – forever!

Finally, the technician showed up. Honey took the day off work to be there. It took hours to fix it I learned later, something about it being connected all wrong. A fuse blew and it shorted out. The more complicated the gadget, the more there is to go wrong with it, I’ve noticed.

The monster now works better than ever. It was not set for high definition before. Now it is so sharp it will burn your eyeballs and singe your eyelashes. “You can tell if it’s high definition by looking at people’s hair,” I was informed by honey, a piece of information that he had just learned from the repairman. “If you can see the individual strands of hair, it’s high definition,” he asserted.

Wow, I don’t know how we could possibly have survived all these years with a TV that had bad hair.

Copyright 2005 Sheila Moss