THROW AWAY SOCIETY

I like to consider myself a fiscally responsible person. My wife would, I believe, attest to that. The girls would more likely use a term like…tightwad.

When we moved to our current house 17+ years ago, it didn’t have cable TV. When the previous owners built the home some 30 years before, it was on the edge of town. I imagine cable didn’t come that far out of town yet, so they put up an antenna for TV reception. As the city limits grew south and cable became available, they apparently decided to just keep the antenna.

When we moved in, the girls were 14, 10 and 7. MTV was real popular at the time (maybe it still is) and it seemed the videos they were showing were just too suggestive for me. So as not to give my girls any more ideas than they were already getting, I decided to keep the antenna. We got all the network channels over the antenna, just not everything else.

Of course I had to hear about it for a lot of years. Even Cindy comments, still today, that we can’t watch our Boilers basketball teams’ road games because they are shown on the Big 10 Network, a channel that doesn’t come in over the antenna. So, as an alternative, I invite ourselves to friends, go to the sports bar, or just listen to it on the radio.

When we go to Cindy’s moms in Vincennes, if we watch TV, we seem to end up on the ‘HGTV’ channel. We get nothing else done because we watch episode after episode. I’m afraid if we had more channels at our house, I’d get less done than I already do because I’d be channel surfing all the time or flipping to HGTV and doing nothing else.

I tell you all of this as some background to my topic. As we all know, at the beginning of 2009, the TV stations converted from analog to digital signals. If you owned a newer TV, it was probably already ‘digital capable’ and ready to receive the new signal. Since I’m a tightwad…we have old TVs.

Even if you had an old TV, if you had cable or ‘dish’ TV, there was no concern because ‘they’ made your conversion between them and your house. Since we had neither, ‘we’ were one of those millions of homes that needed to buy a converter box.

So I did…and the big switch created no problems. We actually began receiving more channels than we did through the analog signals on the antenna.

Yesterday morning, we flipped on the TV and saw only static. I checked to make sure it was on the right channel…it was. I unplugged and plugged the converter box back in…still static. I turned the DVD player on and the TV worked. That meant it must be a converter box problem. It’s less than a year old…it’s bad already?

So…I went back to our bedroom and turned on our ‘other’ old TV. It worked. I unhooked the converter, took it into the living room, hooked it to the TV and lo and behold, everything worked. I took the ‘bad’ converter back to the bedroom and sure enough...static on the TV. Definitely, bad converter.

I looked closely at the bad converter. There was a plug, an antenna ‘in’ port and an antenna ‘out’ port…that was it. No dials, no buttons. Apparently it was built so that you hooked it up and it either worked…or it didn’t. Mine didn’t!

So, I headed to the store to tell them about the bad converter. The guys at the store were sympathetic. “That’s too bad…you might contact the manufacturer to see if you could send it in to them to fix it.” Of course, I’d have to pay to mail it to them…wait for them to repair it (if they could)…wait for them to mail it back, call me or mail me to say it can’t be fixed…or just buy a new converter.

I bought a new converter. The old one?...Threw it away!

Within the last 5 years, Cindy and I had the kitchen renovated with all new appliances. Earlier this year, our dishwasher began making noises and then just quit working. A repairman came to check it. Motor was no good. For just a little more than the cost of repairing the old motor, we could buy a new one…We bought a new one. The old one?...Threw it away.

When was the last time you saw a TV repairman? What do we do when our TVs go bad?...We buy a new one. It’s probably less expensive and more timely than fixing the old one. The old one?...Throw it away.

We are a ‘throw away’ society.

My concern? Some of ‘my’ parts are beginning to break down. I sure hope Cindy doesn’t get a new model…and throw me away!


Dan