In Dying Color

My television is making a shrieking sound; as if, were it a human being,  someone were applying live electrodes to its testicles. Which is unfortunate, because hearing that sounds makes me want to apply live electrodes to its testicles.

Back in the heady days of 2004, when high definition television was in it’s infancy and many people had things that history will refer to as “jobs”, I, in fact, had two jobs: one at an insurance company that paid the day-to-day bills, and one at a radio station that allowed me invade upon unsuspecting people, erroneously feeling safe in their own cars, with vile, thinly-veiled dick jokes. This job didn’t pay the bills, but it did make me feel slightly less suicidal ideation over spending forty hours a week in a cubicle at a fucking insurance company.

As such, I had money, as the old wealthy refer to it, pouring out of my asshole. What I didn’t have was time. On Fridays, after forty hours plus ten hours commuting, I would arrive home at 5 p.m. with a single mission: pour enough beer quickly enough down my throat to be asleep by 9 at the latest, because I had to get up at 2 a.m. to be at the radio station by 3 to prep to go on the air for five hours at 6…

…And having reread that paragraph, it occurs to me that I’m complaining that I had to drink… for my job. But trust me: drinking is like any other form of recreation: it’s only fun if you don’t have to do it. It’s like sex: awesome… right up until someone jams a gun barrel against your brain stem and tells you it’s time to get it up. A fistful of Cialis and a shoehorn might keep you alive, but the neighbors aren’t exactly gonna be pounding on the walls to make you keep the noise down.

Anyway. By the time I would get off the air at 11 a.m., I would be exhausted with a severely confused internal body clock. My normal routine would be to somehow point the car towards home, whereupon I would begin drinking again to put me to sleep for three or four hours in the afternoon in order to recalibrate my brain into understanding Eastern Standard Time again, so I would be able to finally actually enjoy drinking on Saturday night. Back then, if Nicholas Cage had hung out with me to prep for Leaving Las Vegas, he not only would have won the Oscar, he’d have won the fucking Nobel Peace Prize. Probably posthumously.

That was my normal post-airshift Saturday morning. However, one Saturday morning, I decided that I was in the perfect condition to choose and purchase an expensive hi-def TV.

Between my bloodshot eyes, inability to answer complex questions about technological issues such as my name, and my distractedly waving my media conglomerate discount card around and muttering, “Can we get this done, For Christ’s sake? I need to lie down,” it was a negotiation for the ages. The sales guy made a shrewd opening move: “Can I help you?” I countered by cleverly pointing at a set and, in a wily fashion, handing him my credit card.

In 2004, there were three choices in high definition TVs: plasma, LCD and DLP. And I had done a little research; plasma had the best color and brightness, but there wasn’t a force on Earth that could prevent it from burning out like a meth head shackled to a tanning bed within ten years. LCD had the sharpest picture, but at the time had an unfortunate tendency to have pixels go dead and to cost something like $80,000 per diagonal inch.

DLP, however, had about the same sharpness as LCD and about the same brightness as plasma, all for thousands of dollars cheaper. This should have been a warning sign to be cautious before purchasing… but then again, the six walls I dazedly stumbled into between my car and the electronics store should also have thrown up a red flag or eleven.

While I was waiting for the TV to be delivered, I researched the technology a little bit. It turns out that DLP was developed by Texas Instruments, who previously was best known for pocket calculators and for competing against the first Apple MacIntosh with the blistering TI994A home computer. In short, I had spent several thousand dollars on a television developed by a company with a history of being on the cutting edge of dead tech. Considering the other best known Texas instruments are banjos and cowshit, I probably should have seen trouble on the horizon.

But when the set finally arrived at my home, the picture was amazing. And the best part was that it had none of the screen burn problems of plasma, and none of the dead pixels of LCD. Of course, what neither of those two technologies had that my TV did was moving parts.

Apparently DLP televisions generate their picture by projecting a powerful beam of light through something called a color wheel, which looks like the kind of View-Master disc preferred by children with learning disabilities and a taste for mescaline. This disc spins 9,000 times per minute, and is aided in these revolutions by the cutting edge digital technology known as ball bearings. And, as we all know, when you have a system that relies on a rapidly-spinning wheel, nothing can possibly go wrong.

Or not. It seems that on early model DLP TVs like mine, the color wheel is susceptible to having these magical digital ball bearings go bad, leading to a terrible shrieking noise. Thankfully, this is only a minor problem that all accounts indicate will pass just as soon as the color wheel explodes.

Not having quite the insane schedule I had when I bought the set, I’ve spent time on the research this time. Apparently getting a qualified television repair technician to replace the faulty color wheel will cost between $600 and $800. Further, I’ve learned that I can obtain an even larger, sharper-pictured LCD for only twice that much, which is still half what I paid for the original TV (Turns out that LCD is the only game in town now; these days, plasma is what you sell at the blood bank to get enough money to buy an LCD TV).

So a reasonable and prudent person would simply replace the faulty television with newer, better, cheaper technology. Of course, reasonable and prudent people don’t spend every evening getting a drink-fueled uncontrollable urge for sweet, sweet revenge.

So I have ordered a new color wheel, which will arrive on Friday. And after I receive it, I will vivisect my fucking ornery, non compliant television. I will yank out it’s fucking guts, and with my bare hands, I will tear out its heart. It’s LIVING, BREATHING, TREACHEROUS, BETRAYING HEART.

I will be doing this on Saturday morning. Because when it comes to electronics, I make the smartest, most prudent moves on Saturday mornings.

[tags]Hi-Def, DLP, televisions, Samsung, dark humor, satire[/tags]