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Sunday, July 29, 2007

Rise of the machines

As Bill Cosby (or, more accurately, Bill Cosby's wife) might say "I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS!!" This is a day that I would really just as soon forget.

The electronics in our house are rising up and revolting, I swear to God. I went to put in a DVD for Anna earlier today, and the damn thing didn't open. Didn't turn on. Didn't do anything. It did not help that just two weeks previously, our other DVD player up and quit in the middle of The Illusionist, necessitating bringing up from the basement my sister's DVD player that she left after she moved to Canada. The loss of that particular DVD player was especially sad as it was our region-free player. Without that, what would we watch our Series One Doctor Who discs on? More of an inconvenience than anything else, but still annoying. And as far as I could tell, there was no way to unlock my sister's DVD player, thus making it region free.

Well, when that DVD player died today (are you keeping up with which DVD player is which?) we had a bit old *sigh* moment and decided that there are very few things in the house that we can't live without, and a DVD player is one of them. So I did a little investigation and found a cheap one at Best Buy that I could unlock to make region free. Thirty bucks. No problem. Heidi went out and bought it. I set it up, unlocked it and we were all back to normal. The part that I didn't mention is that the one that had died previously (my sister's, not our former region free one, which was given away at the garage sale to an intrepid soul that thought he might be able to make it work) magically started working again. Let's pour a little more salt on the wounds.

We contemplated taking the new one back, but honestly, we do like our region free DVD player so we kept it. We sat down tonight to watch a movie and it was working fine. It started to get late and Anna was getting tired so Heidi got up to help her brush her teeth. I started pushing buttons on the remote control and inadvertantly pushed the button that changes it to progressive scan. This totally FUBARed the DVD player to the best of my knowledge. I tried EVERYTHING I could think of to fix this. I can't get it to work. Motherf*ck.

So finally, I decided, screw it. I set up the old one. I boxed up the other one. I dug through the garbage to find the receipt. It's going back to Best Buy tomorrow after work at which point they will either tell me how to fix it or they will take it back and refund my money. A part of me doesn't want a DVD player that temperamental as Anna is not always the most careful when it comes to her DVD remote control manipulations. So who knows.

I know that I'm being dramatic, but there are so many things going on around here these days - the general anxiety that everyone has surrounding Heidi's upcoming trip, the fact that I have to work at all during the time that she's gone, necessitating a lot of driving around to try to get Anna to and from my mother-in-law's. It is also coming off the craziness that was the garage sale. Overall, this weekend has been far from relaxing. Thank goodness I have Tuesday and Wednesday off.

In any event, I'm sitting here listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter's live cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark" which is, simply put, lovely. It is calming me a bit. However, I am going to go take an Ativan and go to sleep. Here's hoping tomorrow is a bit better than today has been. Or at least less stressful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dan..bc here..i finally get a chance to voice how i feel about this particular issue..the products of today are no longer coming from japan which would be great but from china...Our cousin todd is making a killing in his profession for one soild reason..china is filled with untalented retards that have poor quality of work and use business as an enormous chance to steal...with todd, all of these big corporations have these percision pieces that need to be made with very low tolerences..like so many republican businessmen they want to go cheap and it bit them in the ass... they sent them to china and china sent back unuseable shit..do you think china gave the money back...you bet your chopsticks they didn't..but what the hell if its cheap and you get things at a good price then it must have value reguardless of how many times we replace the same fucking thing in one year..i have a cd player in my garage made in 1986 and it still works...its was made in osaka japan...quality is imparitive..i likely feel that way due to my line of work but there is an old saying in dentistry..you can do it right,or you can do it twice....america should wake up to that and embrace that...

Yuяi said...

"Rise of the machines"..no kidding!! Wuzzup with all that $hit?! I think you handled it pretty well; I'd have thrown a major fit on top of all those mechanical breakdowns! And did I read correctly that you've had to replace your iPod a 3rd time?! Somebody stop the insanity! :)