The Big Screen Television Set

When we bought our new home a year and a half ago, it came with a big screen television set in the basement. It came with speakers installed in the walls and in the ceiling to give a cinema-hall quality sound. We thought that would be a nice thing to have with our house.

Well, we moved in and discovered that the television only played the Spanish channel. I figured that we could reprogram the television so that it would get all channels but it wasn’t at all obvious how to do this. We had the cable television guy look at it and he was no help. Unfortunately, the manual for the television set was missing and the guide for stepping us through the reprogramming was so complex, we never could get it to work.

I spent hours and hours fiddling with it. I thought of connecting the cable wires to the VCR and the VCR to the television to circumvent the problem. It did give us the sound but not the picture.

The television had the logo of a local satellite dish company. I figured that maybe the television was cleverly designed so that it would only work with the satellite dish so that the owner would have no choice but to pay for their service. But we didn’t want satellite dish.

We could watch movies with the big screen television – the DVD player worked. But the speakers were useless because the previous owners decided to take some of the necessary equipment out at the last moment (and never told us about it). So for a year and one half we have had a big screen television and speakers and they were only of partial use.

Then this weekend we decided to do something about that. We decided to buy real furniture for enjoying our television. We have been watching television on a screen about half the size of our big screen television. And since we had that television set up in the exercise room so my wife could watch here aerobic exercise videos, we would watch television while lying on the carpet. Lying on a carpet is fine when you are in your twenties but when you reach 40, it really is a pain in the back – literally.

So I went to Best Buy (the electronics store) to ask if about the equipment to make the speakers work and I also ask again (maybe for the fourth or fifth time) if there might be a way to get that television to work. The young man suggested that unplug everything and try to reprogram the channels again. Well – I had tried that before.

But I tried it again - still no luck. I was about to give up for the tenth time when my wife decided to try it again. She noticed that the television was in a slightly different mode than before – at least now the television channel number showed up in the upper right corner but we still only got Spanish channel. She went through the setup a few times.

And then, like a miracle, something happened. The step that I had been looking for literally for years came up and the television began searching for channels. And then we were getting all of our cable channels – right there on the big screen television!

But I feel useless. I don’t know which make me feel more useless: not watching television on a perfectly workable big screen television for a year and a half because I could not figure out how to reprogram it or the fact that my wife was the one who eventually did figure it out. Well, anyway, it works now.