Beware The Ides of March

I love my girl desperately, but her role in our lives as an unwitting harbinger of doom cannot be denied, probably even by her. It’s like she’s the most benign form of Scanner; she has a gift that benefits nobody, but when she uses it, your head will fucking explode.

“Beware the Ides of March,” she intoned as she walked down the stairs yesterday, while I was busily assembling a pile of tools with which to disassemble my treacherous, squealing DLP television.

“Keep your filthy Latin curses to yourself,” I said, “Look around you: we have the tools, we have a detailed set of repair instructions with full color pictures, and,” I continued as I gestured at the unopened UPS overnight box, “We have the parts to get it done. We’ll have this thing back together in time to see the Celtics lose to the Hawks.”

“But you don’t like basketball,” she said.

“After a week of this fucking thing shrieking at me, I’d watch a test pattern if it was quiet. Now grab that flashlight and help me get this pig open. Trust me: this will go swimmingly.”

It only took ten minutes before I found myself looking at a key screw that was five inches away from the handle of my four-inch screwdriver. A thirty-minute round trip to Home Despot, and we were back in business… until internal wires not noted in the detailed instructions prevented certain key components from being removed to where I could reach them with a ten-inch screwdriver, or even Dr. Manhattan’s wang.

Which entailed popping plastic connecters off with a flathead screwdriver and yanking the wires. “Don’t worry about those connecters,” I told my girl, “Even if they’re sheared off, the wires’ll connect back snugly when I put this back together.”

“I believe you. You don’t have to convince me that you know what you’re doing,” she said.

“It isn’t you I’m trying to convince.”

Finally, after two deliberate hours of following the instructions, photographing the components before and after disassembling them and taking detailed notes so I could reassemble the set, I triumphantly removed the screaming color wheel. “Excellent!” I said, “Now let’s open up the box and get the new color wheel!”

I slip open the UPS package, removed the internal box labeled “color wheel”…

And the fucking thing was shattered in three pieces inside the box.

Now, this conundrum may appear to be my fault. After all, when I got the new device, I didn’t bother to open it up and make sure that it was intact before staking my future on it being what they said it was on the invoice. And the argument could be made that, had I carefully inspected what I had been told was the magical instrument that would solve all my problems, I wouldn’t be in this mess. To which I can only reply: fuck you, communist.

It’s not my responsibility to make sure that what’s in the box actually works. The people who sold it to me are pros, and should have sent me an instrument that did what they said it did. And there’s no reason that I should go without just because they weren’t as careful as they should have been, or because I didn’t look inside the box. Hell, it made me feel better not to look too closely at the box. If I had, it would have blown my confidence, and I never would have had the balls to take the TV apart in the first place.

So, in a few minutes, the place where I bought the part will open, and I will call them and inform that that they sent me a device that was fundamentally defective. And that since I relied upon their good word that the device was fit for it’s intended purpose, I intend to demand that they make good by sending me a new 72-inch LCD television free of charge.

Whaddya mean, it’s ridiculous that I should expect to profit on a disaster that I contributed to by not looking closely at a broken device that inspection would have clearly shown was unfit for the purpose I believed it to fulfil? This is America, Jack. And I’ve got legal precedent on my side, and… and…

…and Christ, I’m a fucking idiot.

[tags]AIG, Wall Street Bailout, DLP television, dark humor, satite[/tags]