The Aerie
I bought a DVD player last night to replace our broken old DVD player. Not a very notable event until I reveal that I bought it... no, not at Best Buy, I haven't sunk THAT low... but at Radio Shack!
[Moe Szyslak]"Bwaah?"[/Moe Szyslak]
Yes! It was amazing. As you know, most of the Time Radio Shack is like some nightmarish netherworld of incompetence and boobery. My past experience has been that if I go into a Radio Shack for item X, I will be accosted upon entering the store.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm looking for item X"
Look of confusion, as if they have never heard of item X, whether item X is a thumb drive, a resistor, or a stereo cable splitter. The salesperson looks at the other salesperson as if to say "It answered! None of them ever answered before! What do I do now, and what's item X?"
I am usually then handed off to a more senior salesperson, while the first salesperson takes a break to calm their nerves. Senior salesperson wanders with me around the store in absolute confusion, then goes off to check "inventory."
Left blessedly alone for a moment, I find item X in a drawer on hanging from a rack. About that time the salesperson comes back.
"I'm sorry, we don't have item X"
"Yes you do, I have it right here."
"Oh! Item X! I thought you said item Ecks."
Then, ringing out, they ask for my name, address, phone number, social security number, mother's maiden name, hat size, date and time of last bowel movement, and preferential arm for injections. Questioning these interrogations usually restarts the terror-and-substitution process that occurred previously, so instead I lie.
Then, a brief upsell later and a refusal of a Radio Shack Credit Card offer, I find myself out the door, half an hour older than I needed to be.
But all that is past.
Last night, just to price check, mind you, I stopped first at Target and then at Radio Shack, intending to proceed on to a real store to buy the DVD player. In my pocket I had a number of DVDs with different video formats in order to test the DVD player.
In Radio Shack I found a very affordable DVD/VCR combo. Usually i swear off such things since, if one half breaks, you have a half broken piece of equipment. But in this case it was so darned cheap that I could never use the VCR portion and it would still be a good buy.
The salesperson did indeed panic-and-swap when I proposed actually TESTING the device by hooking it to one of the many flatscreen monitors displaying college hoops, but the substitute salesperson was not so squeamish. Some wiring and testing later, and I was looking at all sorts of different video formats, all properly displayed on the screen.
While this was going on I checked the internet for the model number, and found the price $30 higher in all cases.
Low price, actual courteous service, and the guy even doubled the warranty coverage in exchange for taking the display model. So I actually bought something at Radio Shack! And enjoyed it!
Of course, I didn't enjoy rewiring the living room entertainment center. Not that it was terribly difficult, but it was tedious and dusty. It didn't help, either, that the cat went nearly insane at the phenomenon of the entertainment center, moved away from the wall, and the TV taken out of it. He kept battling the dust bunnies behind it, and then leaping up into the TV hole as if to say, "Ta-daaah! It's the dusty cat show!"
Then of course there was the fun of trying to wire up the DVD player while the cat went into excited convulsions at the idea of something scrabbling around inside a small dark hole. I'm in there trying to thread the coaxial onto the back of the box, and suddenly a clawed paw shoots into the hole and attempts to make short work of my index finger. Cursing I look up to find the cat, dangling head down off the back of the cabinet in order to reach the hole for the wires, fairly vibrating "Prey! Prey! Live prey!"
He meowrled forlornly when I locked him upstairs.
Reassembled, the dust bunnies vacuumed up, the wires freshly strung, I was all ready to test the setup, when my wife arrived in search of her fix on NBC's "Medium." But an hour later, one mad serial killer later, the tests worked fine, and I was able to watch "Troops," downloaded from the Internet, on a real TV screen, for the first time ever. Yay!
Posted by Albatross at February 28, 2007 11:45 PM | TrackBack