I love the United States, my home is large, air-conditioned, and there are 14 rooms for my family to enjoy, all three of us. To top it off, I have 6 TV’s, 3 computers, 3 iPads and 3 iPhones. Heaven forbid one of us could move more than 4 feet without some pixelated artwork bouncing off our retinas.
I get to take cheap pot-shots at everyone all the time; it’s an occupational perk. Today, however, I’m swinging at me and every other guy who appears to have more money than brains and just can’t resist the latest TV, surround sound system or portable computing device that Apple or Samsung throw in front of us. Today you get to see something new; the bad guy is me and everyone like me. When did I stop repairing TV’s and start biffing them out to get a new one?
Now, I can see how it happens, a clever ad campaign here, a price discount there and the television repairman is now as needed as the milkman and the buggy whip maker. Hindsight is simple; they keep producing them cheaper and cheaper, just like the American mid-sized sedan, cheap with obsolescence built in. It never used to be that way, so what happened? Profit happened, laziness happened and self-control vanished with the lower prices and bigger screens, and I fell for it … boy, do I feel stupid. I should know better, I do this for a living; if they got me I can see how they got you.
Ok, I’m going to work on not being so stupid every time one of my electronic devices makes a noise or gets a scratch on it, which surprisingly always happens just as a newer and better model is introduced, so that may take some time. What I can focus on now, at the very least, is what to do with the ones that keep piling up around the house, and yes in the garage for some of you. Come on, every one of you has at least one TV you can’t even give away and a computer and monitor stashed somewhere. There they sit and there they stay. They will stay right where they are until you move and you know it. It’s only when we decide we need that newer and bigger home and have to pack all the crap we’ve accumulated that we finally decide to off it. Perhaps if we did it as a regular thing, we wouldn’t have to move at all.
So again, I ask you to click the little widget on the top left of the page and we’ll tell you how to do it one little bit of kit at a time … By the way have you seen Apple is coming out with the iWatch and the iTV? … Aghhh stop.