dlyon  Jan 7 2005 - 8:37am  Opinion/Editorial   

By Terese Karmel
It sits there like a gaping mouth, this 25-inch flat screen television that has insinuated its way into my life.
To be sure, it was most generous of them and fit the classic definition of a gift as something you would never buy yourself. But after living with it for more than a month, I’m still not sure what to do with it.
The APEX television (now called television “receiver,” a word I had previously associated with football), was a most generous gift from my daughter and son-in-law whose previous visits from their home in St. Louis to Connecticut had apparently convinced them that the old 16-inch screen, separate CD player and VHS recorder — all easy for us to manipulate — needed some consolidation. And so after a call from the road that they would be delayed in traffic, they finally pulled up in front of our house with the television attached to the rear of their rental car with bungee cords, much like Santa’s pack is magically connected to the his sled.
After my son-in-law and partner hauled it into the house (my partner traces his back pains to that escapade), they spent the next 48 hours moving parts around, hooking it up and then, putting us through basic drills to make sure we had some fundamental knowledge of how to operate it beyond just turning it on and off. I knew we should have had it all written down step-by-step but we foolishly trusted ourselves to remember everything.
“Until a few weeks ago, I thought a DVD was a sexually-transmitted disease,” I heard my partner mumble at one point during the installation process.
Reorganizing our living room into an “entertainment center” (the old VCR was moved into the bedroom and hooked up to the old television) made some sense since coincidentally, we had purchased a combination DVD Player/Video Cassette Recorder a week earlier when the old CD player broke down. (The old CD player didn’t do anything but play discs — one at time — and that was fine with us, but a heady salesperson suggested that not getting the new combination would be a foolish waste of money. I guess he was right.)
Sunday afternoon, after they were well on their way back to St. Louis, my partner and I sat on the living room couch staring at the television. (I kept thinking we probably belonged in a New Yorker cartoon.) The collection of printed manuals —in a pile about as thick as Webster’s dictionary — was neatly collected and stuck on a shelf next to the three pieces of equipment (cable box, DVD player, tuner) stacked on a table under the television. Under the old system, I was the manual (see diagram).
“Do you know what to do?” I finally asked him. He indicated he trusted himself with the basics: at least to get a television picture and, hopefully, the sound. Recording something or listening to a CD weren’t even on our radar screen at that point.
Finally he picked up one of the four remotes (why does anyone need four remotes?) and gingerly pushed the “power” button. Nothing happened. Then he remembered something about pushing a “TV” button — which he then promptly did — and, as I recall, some black and white dots appeared. He mumbled something about a “video” button, located it on the remote and pressed it. Like magic, a picture appeared, accompanied by sound. A lot of sound. How to turn down the volume became the next challenge. This, he remembered, required another sequence of buttons and then using the old remote (to the cable box — we at least had that concept), we pressed volume, those familiar green volume lines appeared and we found much to our delight that we could adjust that, as well.
The next night, there was another glitch — something we couldn’t do, something really basic (maybe as basic as turning the thing off), so we hurriedly called St. Louis and were walked through the process and it worked. Since then we’ve tried to be the problem solvers, ourselves, with hit-and-miss success. For example, we’ve lost the capacity to get a number of FM stations on the tuner that we got before everything was combined. A clock on the DVD player reads “0000.0000.” And I still have trouble a) getting any volume and then, once I get it, b) adjusting it. As far as taping a show — we haven’t dared to try to do it on the new set. I know we’re losing something in quality, but it’s better than nothing. And I’m sure it would be nothing if we went with the new one.
My partner has gotten a little more confident about the whole thing; perhaps it’s because he’s male. And occasionally I suck it up and will venture to go through the sequence to get a television show (Here’s the sequence: “power/tv/video/volume/SAT/cable”) Sometimes I feel like I’ve got it down. Then an incident occurs, I get discouraged and I’m back to square one. This happened the other night when I played a CD during dinner with friends. Later, after everyone had left, I hit the power button on the DVD/Video Cassette Recorder/everything else, and went to bed. It seemed easy enough.
The next morning, I wanted to check the weather so I tried the usual routine to turn on the (“power/tv/video/volume/SAT/cable”) but all I got were black and white dots. I remembered during the installation weekend, some one telling me to NEVER EVER hit one of the “power” buttons but since it had been late the night before, I’m sure I forgot and hit it. I never got the television to work that morning.
When I left, the house, the black and white dots were still dancing to the music of time, my partner had not yet noticed the latest fiasco and the black and white cat was batting the array of manuals I had dumped out on the rug around with her paw. Once in a while, she appeared to be looking at the screen with great interest.
Terese Karmel is the Chronicle's feature editor