Does anybody remember a cartoon from the good old days of the Electric Company and the “Sweet Roll” cartoon sketch? A waitress is taking a man’s order for a sweet roll, and though she tells him repeatedly that they are out, he asks for various beverages and adds the request for a sweet roll, finally giving up and asking for just the roll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2JbTtJ3Aeo
That’s what I went through with the cable company, on the holiday of all days, when I wanted to see if somebody was available to switch out a heavy television and hook up a new one. I told the customer service associate that the set had gone off, on and then off again, and no signal was coming from the set, so it was dead. She then asked if I had turned the set off and on again; I told her I couldn’t because the set was dead, so I could not turn it off. She then had me run a diagnostic of the cable box, which produced no signal because the television was dead. She then ran a check remotely from her location, which produced a healthy signal from the box but nothing from the television because IT WAS (bleeping) DEAD. Of course I did not use such harsh language with a poor contact center employee working the holiday, though I’m sure she got paid well for it. I also didn’t tell her that I would gladly go on record and tell whatever call monitoring service they use that it really should not be required to go through a whole litany of stuff when all I really needed was a technician with some muscle.
This went on for a few minutes, with me thinking of that comedic ditty “Star Trekkin'” in which the “voice” of Bones McCoy intones, “It’s worse than that; it’s dead, Jim.”
After ten minutes of protocol, she came back with the diagnosis that the television was indeed devoid of life.
It turned out that my neighbor, bless her heart, came by and risked life and limb to help me lift the sucker off the console and put up the new one, and because the old and new sets were the same manufacturer, we were able to photograph the setup from the back, recreate it on the new set and, fortunately, there was no syncing issue.
So two women saved a ton of money doing the job ourselves. Huzzah!
And the corpse that was the old television will go to scrap somewhere, because it is dead.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 