To hate, or not to hate…

… that is the question.

Chaos reigns supreme in our house.

Some of you may know, most of you won’t…  Several weeks ago we received notice that our television that we’ve enjoyed for several years was being recalled due to a possible fire hazard.

Scary huh!?  Let me quickly point out that about 3 years ago while watching it, it made a very high pitched (almost dog whistle high) whine, and shocked me from 2m / 6ft away.  Nothing major, but like a big static zap that set my hair slightly on end, and then went completely black.  At the time the company we bought it from sent someone out to replace a part and it’s run beautifully ever since.

My thoughts…  Perhaps that happened to a few other people, hence the recall.  Anyway, I digress.

We shipped this television all the way from Australia to America, shopped around to find a step-up transformer to run it (American power is 110v and Australian is 240v), and have been getting on with our lives.  Until the recall.

Mark contacted the manufacturer, who shipped us a replacement television all the way from Germany to America, and we sent our old one back.  Pretty cool when you consider the television is a good 5-6 years old.  We agree, it is pretty cool, not totally though.  You see, we also bought the matching television stand with built in sub-woofer for the original television, and DVD and VCR players too.  None of them now work with the new television, and the stand is completely redundant.  It doesn’t fit any of the new televisions, and it’s a completely different colour.  Our old television was black, the new one is a pale grey.

I might be looking a gift horse in the mouth, but that’s a couple of thousand dollars of equipment that we can no longer use, all because of a equipment recall that was not our fault.  Mark even contacted the manufacturer again, their response was pretty much “tough, sell the stand on eBay”.

In my view that’s not good enough…  We found a different stand, one that was from the same company, but it was over $2000 worth.  So that idea was quickly knocked on the head.

Loewe, I applaud you for your efforts to replace our television, but your lack of interest or concern in the additional inconveniences your company have caused us have pretty much ensured that in the future we’ll look elsewhere for electrical appliances.

We recently found an much cheaper alternative to replace the old television stand, although we no longer have a sub-woofer, but we’re moving on with out lives.

Right now as I type this, Mark is working his way through dozens, if not thousands of cables wiring everything back up.  A totally nightmarish job, but I put the unit together and spent the next 30 minutes measuring up the glass panels to ensure they were all precisely placed so as to be able to support the weight of the components.  A job that was much more tedious (in my mind) than plugging in a few game consoles, which incidentally Mark HAD TO HAVE, so it’s only fair he plugs them in.  Besides I do all the hard stuff like moving things back into place because they’re too heavy for Mark. 😉

I reckon it’ll be another hour before we can settle back on the couch and watch The Queen and Notes on a Scandal.

Should be good, and it’ll be nice to have the lounge room back in an acceptable position after everything be temporarily out of place while we searched for the new stand.

Time to go, we’ve the rest of Sunday to enjoy.

Hooroo!