I am afraid of television.
Not watching TV. Oh, no, I am fully capable of watching television every spare minute and until my eyes are red and burning.
What I mean is, I’m fearful of buying a new TV. I just feel it in my bones that if I brought home a new TV I wouldn’t be able to install it or make it work.
TVs and other electronic devices now are so complex and complicated, you pretty much need to hire an expert to make them go. No accident, in my opinion. Electronics companies stay up nights thinking up new ways to separate us from our money. We Americans are divided into those who pay and those who get paid.
But it’s not just the money I resent. I don’t enjoy feeling like an idiot just because I can’t figure out how to make a TV work.
But, I was not always the idiot you see before you. Once, I could not only make a TV work, I could actually repair a broken TV.
The young will not believe this. But some of you might remember … the picture would go all twisty-sideways, or roll up and down uncontrollably, or just go fuzzy.
When this happened to my TV, I’d unplug it and, ignoring the printed warning, unscrew the back. I’d remove all the tubes – that’s right, tubes. What are tubes? Look it up online – put the tubes in a bag and take them to the drug store.
In the back of the store was a device for testing TV tubes. The face of the tube tester consisted of plug holes of various sizes for the several-sized tubes. You plugged in each tube and an attached meter would show whether each tube was working or had burned out.
I’d take my tubes out of the bag and plug them in one at a time. OK, the 6AZ8 works. So does the 12AU7A, and the 6DE6.
A-ha, the 6BZ4 is dead.
I’d go to the counter and tell the clerk I needed at 6BZ4, which cost only a couple of bucks. I’d take the new tube and all the good tubes home, plug them into the TV, put my feet up and watch “Gunsmoke.”
So it was long ago in an America far, far away, an America in which we were the masters of electronic devices, not the other way around. In that America, if you wanted to watch, or call, or toast you just plugged it in and turned it on.
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Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.