April 02, 2006

Don't touch TV knobs

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day with Hirai-san visiting second hand shops in the Okayama area. I ended up with a stove, a heater and a toaster all for under $70. Not bad. On the way home we stopped at Tanushi-san's house to get the fitting for my washing machine and she produced a TV which she said I could borrow!! I was so excited, now my little house would have a distraction in it, yay! A friend of mine from Hiroshima was going to come up with weekend so I was all excited about that, but ended up not coming so I was facing a whole 3 days in my own company, which I am not very practiced at these days so the TV would provide a very welcome distraction from my own thoughts.

An hour later though, things (by which I mean my mood) had quite changed owning to the fact that Hirai had completely stuffed the TV. I can't really be too pissed off becasue he did give up basically his entire Saturday just to help me out, and a good deal of that time was spent cutting up antennae cords trying to get reception on the TV. But when we finally did get a decent picture (albeit for only one channel) he decided to try and "fix" the screen by fiddling with some knobs on the front and the whole thing descended into snow and nothing has been seen of anything remotely resembling reception ever since.

"ARGH!" was what I thought.

"Oh well, no worries." was what I said.

I blame this whole incident on the Japanese obsession with perfection. I had, for two minutes, a totally watchable TV reception. Sure, everyone had a second self 2cm to their left, but I could hear it, it was colour, I could see the gist... Why touch the knobs if you don't understand what they do???

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