Upgrades All Around

Never upgrade your technology. That's what I've learned. The minute you upgrade one item, you have to upgrade everything that goes with it.

Tiffany and I put off buying a new television for years. Our old TV was fine, we told ourselves. Why spend the money to replace something that's not broken?

But, after some of Tiffany's family members came to visit and saw what we were working with, they teamed up and got us a very big flat screen HD TV for Christmas.

We were worried about pretty much every aspect of how to get the new TV functioning. Cords and cables intimidate us--me especially. We picked up the gigantic box from FedEx and left it sitting in our living room for two weeks before we opened it up. When we finally did, I had snacks and drinks handy to fortify us for the work ahead.

But it turns out new TVs are pretty easy to set up. There were a few screws involved to get the screen on its stand, but mostly Tiffany plugged in colored cords to their corresponding colored holes. The hardest part of the process was getting the battery cover off the remote. I scurried into our bathroom for a fingernail file and pried it open.

"Ta-Da!" we said together as the cover flew across the room.

When the TV came on, we felt empowered. But none of our channels looked any clearer than they had before. Everyone had promised us our picture would look "so real... almost too real." But our picture looked exactly as it did on the enormous old TV which we had just carried down to the car of an ill-prepared craigslist shopper. She came to our place with a grocery dolly that would have been crushed under the weight of her purchase. She apparently is less tech-savvy than we are:

"Oh, I didn't realize it would be so new!" she said as we pointed to the monstrosity in our hallway.

I raised my eyebrows at Tiffany.

Anyway, when our new TV's picture looked exactly like our old TV's picture, I called my brother.

"You got a new TV?" he shouted. "Thank God!"

"But it doesn't work," I protested. "How do we make our channels come in HD?"

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

"You're not going to like this," Brandon said.

"What?"

"You have to pay for HD channels."*