Don Vandervort, Head Homeboy, has written more than 30 DIY home improvement books, been a segment host on HGTV, served as MSN.com's home improvement expert and written countless magazine articles.
My mom lives with us, and her TV had turned into a thin red line. She started watching just the line and listening to the news and her shows instead of watching. This just seemed too sad during the holidays so we decided to take her TV in to get fixed, even though buying a new TV would’ve been cheaper than having it fixed.
We lugged the thing off her shelf. Holding the TV was like carrying a dead moose in a two ton suitcase, and just as bulky. After wrestling it into the car and dropping it at the TV fixit guy’s place (let’s just call him Scandalously Overpriced), we came home. That night it seemed like every electrical appliance we owned decided to go the way of the TV. In protest, one by one, they were all breaking. The toaster oven decided its new setting was Burn Everything. The VCR in the bedroom kept spitting out every tape we stuck in like it had suddenly gotten taste in movies. The VCR in the living room (one of those dual DVD/VHS things, the hybrid car of video) decided the DVD we stuck in there was never going to come out again. We could not get the thing to open, and when it finally did open, the disc was magically gone. Still hiding inside. We had to take a screwdriver to remove the whole top panel, and there was the DVD just hanging out in there, looking innocent, smoking a cigarette.
I don’t like going inside electronic equipment. There is a reason there’s a guy in a dank little office in Burbank who spends his life squinting into the netherworld of dark spaces and charging me up the wazoo for fiddling with those green plates that have shiny metal dots. I know what I’m good at. Breaking things.
So instead of going on vacation this winter, we’re thinking of having that Burbank guy fix every appliance in the house that is broken. When our kids are able to eat toast that is lightly done while watching their favorite video straight through without it being eaten, we’ll look at them and say “Enjoy Disneyland, because this is it, baby.”
