So I turn on my television for the first time in three or four days and I am greeted with static… on every channel. I’m not even getting PBS or the Spanish channel. My first thought is that my antenna must have come disconnected – my wife has three insane cats that have it out for me, so it isn’t a stretch to imagine they’ve gone and screwed something up once again.
When I check the antenna the U-connectors are firmly screwed in to the base-plate… so I start to wonder if my television has suddenly called it quits. This would suck because we are still making minimum payments on the Circuit City credit card we used to pay for it… and we just got it in 1998. Something just irks the crap out of me every time I have to replace something when I’m still paying for the first one. It’s like I’m paying for something I don’t even get to use any more, there should be some kind of law in place that makes it so if an item breaks and the company that sold it to you is still trying to charge you money for it they should be forced to fix it or refund the balance owed, because right now things don’t seem very fair for consumers. This happens to us every time we upgrade computers too. We need t upgrade at least once a year to stay up to date for gaming, but we’re still stuck with credit card balances from computers that haven’t been used in YEARS… It’s a huge freaking scam.
So I’m stumped and have no idea what broke. The only other TV we own is a huge wooden console unit upstairs. The thing seems to weigh like 250 pounds at least so when we stopped using it we just let it sit and threw a table cloth over it to use it as a make-shift credenza. Now it serves as a sort of mural to my mother-in-law, with half a dozen pictures of her and her cats. Although it hasn’t been used in over ten years I’m pretty sure it still works, the only problem we ever had with it was that it sat too low to the floor.
I grab a screwdriver and run upstairs with the antenna. I remove all the crap from the top of the TV, plug it in and attach the antenna. I turn the volume/power knob up to about halfway and hear the static before I see it. I’m clicking the channel knob from channel to channel but all I’m hearing is static on every freaking station. After a few more seconds the screen warms up and the statics slowly fades in to view. No dice. By this time I’m pissed, and slamming shit around. I turn the tv off, slam the control panel door and yank the antenna as hard as I can without bothering to unscrew the u-leads. I don’t care if the leads rip out, I can screw the god damned thing on even if it’s just bare fucking wire. By this time my wife knows something is up and comes out of the office with one of those looks on her face that make me wish we lived back in the 1800’s, for reasons best left unexplained.
I know whats coming and I quickly turn and start down the stairs to get away from her before she starts trying to push my buttons… But we both know she’s going to get a word in just to piss me off, and of course she says some smart ass comment telling me to calm down. Okay, YOU CAN’T FUCKING TELL AN ANGRY MAN TO CALM DOWN WHEN HE IS MAD. Does this work FOR ANYBODY??? All it does to me is make me angrier… FUCK. She KNOWS she shouldn’t do it, I’ve told her a thousand times to leave me alone when I’m in a bad mood, but she needles and prods and pushes, and gets bossy and insults me by trying to act like a mother instead of a wife. I swear to god she is trying to push me to do something stupid to use as ammo during a divorce if I ever decide to dump her ass and find a woman that isn’t such a royal bitch to me when I’ve had a bad day.
I come close to just turning around and throwing the antenna at her and telling her to fix the damn thing herself, knowing full well she doesn’t know shit about televisions, but I’m not in the mood to prolong a fight just to satisfy her need to argue.
I remember reading a couple months ago about all the TV going digital, so I’m pretty sure now I know what the problem is. Sure enough I look it up online and I guess we need cable now just to watch TV. First of all I thought the plans for this were canceled. I distinctly remember hearing they canceled it… What the hell gives them the right to tell me how to watch my own TV? We live on a shoe-string budget and can’t even afford $20 basic cable… And now we can’t even watch a TV I’m still fucking paying for.
Shouldn’t this be illegal? I mean, nobody is supposed to OWN the airwaves, and now I can’t even watch TV without paying some MONOPOLY for the right to use MY OWN television? Just another huge scam by a government less concerned about freedom and more concerned about how to flex their muscles to prove who’s in charge.
Does anyone know of any online petitions against this stuff?
