Less than a week before the Super Bowl, a technophobe makes a mad dash for a big-screen TV.
A certain frenzied logic takes over five days before the Super Bowl when the Saints are playing and your wife was born and raised in New Orleans and you can't possibly justify $3,000 a ticket plus airfare and hotel. The rationale is unassailable: I presently have a 30" television screen. A 30" screen just will not do. Therefore, I need a bigger TV.
Powerless to argue against such an ironclad line of reasoning, I bumbled into my preferred (closest) home electronics retailer. By the way, I do literally bumble into stores selling anything more technologically advanced than a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal (picture Cro-Magnon man entering a bookstore). I always dread the impending sales encounter, because I know each word I say after "hi" showcases my astounding (even to me sometimes) depth of ignorance and convicts me of supreme irresponsibility.
After all, I have done zero homework. I know it, and very, very soon so does everyone within earshot. I am the adult equivalent of the child who throws a wadded up dollar bill and a few miscellaneous coins on the candy store counter and asks the proprietor, "How much can I get for this?" But now, the stakes are higher. We're not talking gumballs anymore; we're talking big-ticket technology, and I might as well be sucking my thumb.
So, there I was, standing shoulder to shoulder with my assigned salesman, surveying three huge walls of big, bigger, and biggest flat-panel TVs, perfectly aligned and stacked, each displaying the same crisp colorful images moving in flawless unison. It brought to mind one of one of those stadium-sized, choreographed-under-the-barrel-of-a-gun tributes to the "Great Leader" in North Korea. And there I stood, like the Great Leader, taking in the grand spectacle before me, knowing nothing and caring little about the individual performers.
I hadn't said anything beyond "hi" at this point, so my salesman presumably still believed he was dealing with an informed television buyer. Then, he asked me the type of probing, qualifying question that throws me for a loop every single time I shop for anything related to home electronics—computers, printers, cell phones, stereos, you name it. "So," he asked, "What kind of [insert home electronics device here] are you looking for?"
Dammit! I knew that topic would come up, but I was inexplicably caught off guard again. Now, because we bought a new TV five years ago, I am vaguely aware of a TV-related technology term or two, so, hoping to establish some cred with this guy, I came back at him with a question of my own. "Do you have any DLPs?" To which he deadpanned, "They don't make 'em anymore." The first full sentence out of my mouth firmly established my obsolescence. I guess I could have followed up with, "Do you have any black and whites with smallish rabbit-ear antennae?"
In a way, though, it was a relief. All my cards were on the table, and I didn't have to act like I knew anything anymore. Now, I could unabashedly stare at what really mattered to me—the price tags—rather than linger at each model, pretending to evaluate contrast ratios, aspect ratios, and various Hz levels. All I wanted, I could now admit, was to see the Super Bowl on the biggest, prettiest screen I could get at my given price point. Imagine Cro-Magnon man in the bookstore again, but now he's bumbled into a large-format Our National Parks picture book. Both he and I are now safe in our comfort zones.
After we got that settled, it took my salesman and me about 20 minutes to sift through my options. Oh, I asked a few throwaway questions about Sony vs. Samsung vs. Panasonic, but he and I now had an unspoken understanding that the answers he gave would be unchallenged by any intelligent rejoinder. He looked mildly disgusted. I have no doubt that if this transaction had taken place in Elizabethan England, he would have cuffed me across my cheek with an empty silken glove at that point and asked rhetorically, "Have you no curiosity, man?"
He was fully in charge and free to steer me whichever way he wanted; I was truly at his mercy. The best I could hope for was that he would act out of a sense of compassion for the hapless, credit-card-wielding techno-child before him and that a gargantuan sales spiff attached to an inferior brand would not tempt him—my Electronic Express Dalai Lama—into embracing his inner Gordon Gekko.
I guess it's still too early to render a final verdict on my salesman's character or the quality of the Acme Bohem-a-tron flat-panel he sold me, but I do know this: I accomplished my mission. We watched my wife's nearly life-sized Saints win their first Super Bowl in 43 years; we gazed in wonderment as the agony of defeat etched itself line by line into Peyton Manning's face in stunning hi-def; and the technology behind that picture remains as gloriously irrelevant to me as ever.
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