Consumed By Consumer Electronics

Stella bought a TV last Thursday, not entirely on impulse (we had discussed the possibility off and on) but not after deep research on the subject, either.

To the good, she bought a Samsung 39", choosing that size because it was the smallest that had a headphone jack (sound insulation between rooms in this old house is negligible) and the brand because both of us had shopped enough to appreciate the picture quality of the newer Samsung TVs... the only thing that looks better is Sony, at a considerably higher price.

To the bad, she bought it from Best Buy. That has turned out to be a major mistake, one that I myself could have made just as easily.

Not quite this disastrous, but...

Yesterday we began setting it up. Since then, it has consumed all of my last two days, and both my and Stella's evening yesterday as we returned to the store to buy a cable for our old DVD/VCR (which we were assured by two of the sales staff would in fact work with the new TV) and to ask questions about the pair of wireless headphones Stella bought for those late sleepless nights each of us occasionally suffers. (Hey, it's part of getting old.)

Every sales staffer who talked to us from two different Best Buy store locations, in person and on the phone, told us at least one false item. I'll save you the agony; I don't have the strength to repeat it all now. But the staff, notwithstanding their passably good attitude, were either abysmally misinformed about their products, or lying through their teeth to clinch the sale. When I am bamboozled by salespeople, I really feel old.,, old and angry.

The short version of the conlusions:

• Plugging the headphones into the TV requires both a digital-to-optical adapter and an optical cable. I have to wonder about the likely lifespan of that (expensive) optical cable, but I don't have to wonder right away, because the store does not sell them... as we were not told at the time of purchase of the headphones... and also not immediately later. Not until we phoned a national last-ditch BB help line did we learn: they can be obtained only online.
  
  
• Our six-year-old DVD/VCR can play into the new TV only through a $20 cable group (and that's the cheaper one), and cannot record from the TV but must have its own converter box (the one we were using before).

Of those two facts, only part of the latter was told to us by the salesman; he sold us the cable group.

Oh, and we make do with broadcast TV; we don't have cable. And the alleged high-quality indoor antenna we bought about 7 years ago really doesn't work very well with this TV, perhaps because we rearranged the whole den to suit the new, larger TV. So it's probably Roku or Aereo for us before it's over; we don't really have an ongoing household budget for a (so to speak) rich selection of cable channels. But that can wait.

Stella had a few calm moments late this evening after some long, animated (!) conversations with sales staff and help lines on the phone, and said that if she had known what would be involved, she would never have bought the damned thing. I have to agree. Both of us have mostly bought computer equipment from Micro Center, where the technical staff seems fairly competent and gives accurate answers to at least basic questions on the equipment they sell and service. That's not the case at BB.

Remember when buying a computer was a vastly more complicated procedure than buying a TV? Those were the days... the days of long ago!