We got back from Senior Choir rehearsal tonight to find ourselves without TV in our living room.  I don’t mean to say that our television set had been stolen (although it might as well have been)    but rather that the screen had basically gone empty and silent,  save for the words “Unusable Signal.”

It was as though life as we knew it had suddenly come to an end.

Actually, not quite.  But it was as though we had lost our electricity,  our indoor plumbing,  and our heat, all in one fell swoop.   And as we worked feverishly to diagnosis the problem and perhaps fix it,  we were both thinking the same thing:   “Not now, Lord!  Not now!”  I don’t think anybody in this good old U.S. of A.  can possibly be enthused about shelling out big money for anything right now, not with the economy on such shaky footing and the prospects for a quick recovery having all but evaporated.  .  . so the thought that our 12-year-old television had finally bitten the dust was not a pleasant thought at all.   And that’s despite the fact that we have been playing with the possibility of buying a new one – maybe even one of those flat screen numbers that so many people are getting.   But once Wall Street started plummeting and the headlines grew more dire by the day,  our clunker has seemed more and more sufficient for our needs and we were pretty much resigned to nursing it along for as long as we could.   But that was before everything went dark.

Anyway,  Kathy and I began working on the problem with the ferocity one usually reserves for matters of life and death.   Job #1=  clear off two shelves of videotapes and DVD’s. . .  which  our case meant a total of 152 videotapes and 60 DVDs . . .  so we could then remove the shelves themselves and get access to our cable unit.   Job #2-  check all of the connections,  which is Kathy’s job because to me that tangle of cords looks like Medusa’s hairdo and makes about as much as sense.   Job #3-  Because the connections seemed to be fine,  I hauled down one of our TV’s from upstairs so we could hook it up to the cable box.  If it worked, we knew it was a problem with the TV.  If we didn’t, we knew it was the cable box.   Job #4-  It was in the midst of doing this phase of the operation- trying to maneuver the portable TV into place to hook up without removing the big TV that we discovered that in fact something was unplugged – and once we had redone job #2 and replugged the errant cords back together, VOILA!  We had TV again.   There is nothing sweeter than solving a problem without shelling out a dime . . .   just a little bit of sweat and smarts.

The most disquieting thing about this experience-  which only lasted about an hour from the discovery of the outage to its rectification-  is how desperately we wanted our TV signal back. . .  in much the same way we feel whenever our modem goes on the fritz and we no longer have internet access.   We suddenly feel as though we’re stranded on one of the moons of Neptune – or might as well be, for as cutoff and disconnected as such a predicament makes us feel.  I don’t like that about our lives and our priorities,  but that’s simply the way it is. . .  and maybe we need a few more outages like this one to remind us that there are worse things in life than missing Grey’s Anatomy.