What happened was this…
A few days ago, Nell discovered all the leads and cables that are tucked behind the TV cabinet. Nom, nom, nom! What larks! What game potential!! Not all of the leads and cables are necessarily attached to anything - equipment comes and goes, the cables always remain, you know how it is. Anyway, she discovered them and Sod’s Law dictated that the one she would choose to mangle unto death would be the one that was vital to the TV/ DVD player/ internet etc. Therefore, His Lordship Malarkey decided to untangle and rearrange the mess of cables, extricating the ones no longer needed - a streamlining exercise, if you will. He planned also to shimmy the TV cabinet as far into the corner as it would go in order that Nell wouldn’t be able to stick her nosy little beak behind it.
I don’t get involved in these activities. I don’t do tech. Andy is Tech Guy. I’m more of your Neanderthal whack-something-with-a-hammer-and-see-what-happens type when it comes to tech. I’ve been assured this is NOT the done thing. It is a BAD approach. So I stepped back and let Tech Guy crack on.
Nell helped, of course, in an unofficial capacity of Tech Assistant. I think that’s where things started to go a bit wrong. There was a bit of a fracas as the mass of tangled leads and cables emerged. A bit of low level swearing and muttering and huffing ensued. I intercepted at this point before someone sustained an injury, and took Nell into the garden for a game of runaround/ throw the ball/ eat a bee/ dig up moss. Whatever.
On our return (following Nell’s refusal to believe me that attempting to eat a miner bee was a terrible idea, both from environmental and health and safety aspects) we were met with a mightily annoyed and grumpy Andy. He’d sorted out the excess cableage, plugged in what was necessary, discarded what was not, and replaced the television on its cabinet. However, in the act of replacing the TV, somehow (he knows not how) the screen sustained a bit of a crack in the top right hand corner, and as a result, the TV now provided sound but no picture. The TV had, in effect, become an enormous and substandard radio.
It was an accident. I wasn’t going to claim on our home contents insurance because the excess we would pay would be more than we’d spend on a new TV. Anyway, we had a spare telly. That’d do!
The old telly was duly installed on the cabinet. To be fair, it is a small telly. Not minuscule, but certainly nowhere near the 40 inch one we were used to. But it was okay. It’d do.
‘Do you want to get a new telly,’ I asked Andy.
‘I’m not fussed,’ said he. ‘Do you?’
‘I’m not fussed, either,’ said I. (This is called an impasse between two people, neither of whom wants to be the one responsible for spending out on a new telly. Nah, the old one would do.)
Over the next couple of days, it became clear that the old telly perhaps wouldn’t do after all.
‘It’s quite difficult to read stuff on the screen,’ said Andy. ‘Are you squinting?’
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘I mean, I CAN read what’s on the screen. But it’s not easy.’
Today, I sent Andy a link to some TVs. And then it turned out he’d spent yesterday evening researching new tellies, and I felt a little bit smug that I hadn’t been the first to capitulate over the telly buying dilemma. As soon as he’d got the link I sent him, though, he was out the door like a shot, to go to Argos to collect the TV he’d already paid for. This is called a Spousal Catalytic Moment.
Back chez nous, he interrupted my viewing of ‘Moana’ to instal the new TV. To be fair, he said he’d wait until the film was over, but I could sense the manly anticipation of playing with a new gadget, and I’d seen ‘Moana’ a couple of times before, so I said, ‘it’s okay, set up the new TV.’ And he did! (In the old days, setting up a new telly involved inserting the aerial cable and plugging it into a socket, but not so these days. These days it’s all passwords, PINs, fannying around with the remote control. When, and why, did life become so complicated?)
Nell watched the new TV for a while. She said it was better than the old one because it had a picture and there was no crack in the screen. Butter wouldn’t melt…
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KJ