Rant #1,955: Broken

Onto a much, much lighter topic today ...

My family's television set in the living room.

It is broken.

Oh, it still works, but it is broken.

This television (not shown in the photo) has given us pretty good service for at least the last 20 years, maybe even more, as I don't exactly remember when we bought the set. My wife and I have been married over 24 years, so it is between 20 and 24 years old.

It is an old TV, not an HD TV, and it is a good Panasonic television, with the extra capacity that it plays DVDs, as within the unit, there is a slot for these disks.

The problem is that that feature has not worked for more than a decade, but that is fine, we have other ways to play these disks if we need to.

But that is not what I am talking about.

Pretty much two or three years ago, we found that every once in a while, the picture would vanish into a horizontal line, and we discovered that we could remove it by hitting the top of the unit.

One hit, and the screen's picture would return.

It would happen every once in a while, so we would invariably say, "Well, the TV looks like it's going," and that was that.

About a year and a half ago, the frequency of this occurrence started to happen each and every time we turned on the TV, and that has been the way it is pretty much for the past 18 months or so.

We turn on the TV, we lose the picture to this horizontal line, and we end up hitting the top of the unit each and every time that it happens.

It now takes several hits before it straightens itself out, and sometimes, it straightens itself out, and then reverts back to the horizontal line.

And this is happening with greater frequency.

I remember the days the you would call in the TV repairman to fix such problems. In the old days, with all the tubes and other things in the TV, it was too costly to simply purchase another TV; you just had it fixed.

Today, it is still too costly to purchase another TV, but you do it anyway.

We have thought about buying another TV, but we put off this thought because once the TV warms up a bit, the problem vanishes, and we get a great non-HD picture.

But it is taking longer and longer to get that picture, so yes, the day is coming when that TV is going to go the way of other devices we have had that have bitten the dust over the years, all replaced with something newer and supposedly better.

Just today, I woke up, got ready for work, and put the TV on, and yes, I had to hit it probably about a dozen times before it locked in.

I am not a technician, and I am sure there are people out there who know what the problem is just by my description, but for right now, the TV stays where it is.

Sure, we hope that it can last many more years, and on the other hand, we know that there will come a day when even hitting as hard as Muhammed Ali once did is not going to get us a picture on the screen.

But right now, we are going to have to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," because we are not going out to buy another TV.

As I am writing this Rant, the TV is playing in the background, and it is playing well, although I am in another room of the house, so although the audio of the TV appears to be fine, I am not near the set, so I don't know if it has its picture or not.

That TV has lasted this long in this state, so my family and I are willing to let it run its due course, and then we will buy a new TV.

For right now, I guess it amounts to a relatively minor nuisance that we can live with.