Rant #2,682: TV OD

Television is my life.
 
No, I don’t work in television, but since I was born in 1957, I have always loved to watch television.
 
I do believe that along with the telephone and the car, it is probably the greatest of all the inventions of the past 150 years or so.
 
As a little kid, I watched the first piece of furniture my parents ever purchased together as a married couple—a large Dumont TV with sliding doors—and it was on that TV that I really learned about life, whether it was from “Ding Dong School” or later, when I saw the JFK assassination saga unfold, seeing Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald right before my six year old eyes.
 
Even later on that TV, I watched the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and I watched the first moon landing with Neil Armstrong setting foot on the orb in the sky with Jackie Gleason’s face on it.

 
When that TV finally went in the early 1970s--it sits in our basement now--I moved on from one TV to another, and they all served their purpose—from analog to HDTV—and each one we had lasted a number of years.
 
One TV I had—a black and white Zenith portable that my grandmother bought me for my room—not only was able to get out of town channels for whatever reason, allowing me to watch the Knicks’ first championship the day prior to my bar mitzvah, when I was sick as a dog—but it also exploded in my hands when a lightning bolt directly hit our antenna during my teen years.
 
Anyway, what this is all leading up to is that yesterday, for the first time in several years, we had to buy a new TV, and my, how the world of TV has changed now that we are in the HDTV age!
 
You can’t just buy a TV anymore, plug it in where you want to, and start enjoying it, and I knew that already because we already have three HDTV in our home, and they all needed a bit of work—mainly attaching to cables—to get the maximum out of them.
 
But this latest purchase—for our living room TV—was certainly the most annoying, for a variety of reasons.
 
First off, getting the old TV out of the house—one of the last analog models made by Panasonic that my family  used for more than two decades--was a major hassle, as it must have weighed about 200 pounds if not more. Getting it out of the living room and down the stairs was a complete catastrophe, but since it didn’t really work anymore, it was something that had to be done.
 
I discovered early on that the TV did not have any handles to grip on, so my son and I somehow lugged it “plop plop” down the stairs and out to the curb.
 
It was really like carrying 200 pounds of dead weight, making it so unlike today’s TVs, which you literally can pick up with zero effort.
 
And not wanting to spend any extra money if I didn’t have to, I brought up my son’s old TV from the basement, just to see if it would work.
 
That was another old analog TV, and no, it didn’t work anymore, but at least I tried it.

 
This one also weighed a ton, but at least it had grips on it, and I was able to bring it out to the curb myself, with little problem.
 
Then we had to go to the store to get a new TV, which we did in late morning yesterday.
 
What TV do we get?
 
We have an entertainment center in the living room, one which dates from the pre-HDTV days, so the space for the TV is large, but is based on analog TV dimensions.
 
Thus, it is vertically large, but not so much horizontally, which is the way TVs are made today, so after measuring, I figured we needed a 28-inch TV.
 
Well, go find one.
 
We went to the store, looked at about 100 different TVs, and there was not a single 28-inch TV in stock.
 
I knew the space could not fit a 32-inch TV, and I knew that whatever we purchased, we would have to perch on something to bring it up to eye level—again, the space is tall but not wide.
 
So we settled for a 24-inch TV, made our purchase, asked about installation just in case, and went home with it …
 
And then the fun began.
 
The legs of the TV had to be attached first, and the screws were so small that you had to drop them into the legs from the back, and hope you hit the target. Only then could you attach them to the bottom of the TV.
 
That part of the procedure must have taken my son and I about 20 minutes to do, but the best was yet to come.
 
We discovered that the TV did not come with an HDMI cable—or any cables—so we could not hook it up to the Dish Network satellite dish we use in the living room for our TV (we have Verizon in the bedrooms—don’t ask.)
 
So we had to set it up without the HDTV for now, and crawling under the entertainment center to locate the connections was something I hope that I never have to do again.
 
I was contorted worse than a pretzel, and several times I lost the wires we needed for at least an analog connection.
 
It took probably two hours to hook it up so we could watch some TV, and then we had to load up the remote with batteries, which, of course, took a lot of time because the batteries that were provided were dead.

 
So by 4 p.m., the TV was hooked up, but we had to find something to put it on to put it at eye level. I found two old VHS tape holders that we had, and right now, the TV is perched on them, to the chagrin of my wife, who came home from work and was not too happy a camper about the whole thing … but she did acknowledge the fact that the space we had was not conducive to the current TVs, she just didn’t like how the whole thing looked.
 
But the TV works!

I did call in for service to get it right, and I purchased an HDMI wire so when the workman comes next week, everything can be hooked up like it should be.
 
Yes, my back and neck still hurt from all the contortions I made, and one day, I will have a good laugh about what transpired yesterday afternoon.
 
But I am not laughing just yet. There is only a limit that I can go to to do certain things, and I reached that limit yesterday.
 
But as I said, I just love TV, and I will love it even better when this thing gets fully hooked up the way it should be, not the “Larry” way.
 
Goodness, I do miss the old TVs … just plug in and play.
 
“Those were the days, my friend.
 
We thought they’d never end.”
 
But I am sorry to say that those days are as dead as those old TVs I got rid of yesterday.