Peter McKay

Early last year, our new 27-inch HDTV broke after only 11 months. (Twenty-seven inches might be pathetic compared to what you have in your house, but it was my pride and joy. Were our house to catch on fire, and I had to decide which to save, the dog or the TV, I pray the dog would be smart enough to chase the guy carrying the big TV.)

We'd bought an extended warranty, though, one that promised that if you had a problem, any problem, they'd send a repairman out to the house to fix it. I called the supersized shoppers club where we bought the TV, explained what happened and looked to the calendar to set a date for my repair visit.

The lady on the line, though, had a different take on things. I'd bought an extended warranty, she said. Turns out my TV broke just three days before the regular warranty, the one from the cheapskate Japanese company, was set to expire. That meant that I'd have to box up my TV, at my own expense, send it across the country to the cheapskate Japanese company and wait 10 weeks. I begged the lady from the supersized shoppers club to reconsider. Couldn't we just forget we'd talked, and I'd call back in three days? Huh? What do you think?

She didn't think that was a good idea. She even told me, with just a little bit of smugness in her voice, that she was making a note of our call in the "system" in case I tried to call back.

Those 10 weeks were agonizing, as we huddled around a little 12-inch TV each night, like Siamese quintuplets. But 10 weeks later, the TV came back, good as almost new, and I forgot about it.

Then, this past week, it broke again. When I pressed the power button, nothing happened. I jumped to my feet, checked the calendar to make sure I was still in the extended (extended!) warranty period and dialed the supersized shoppers club repair line.

I didn't get the same lady, but I might as well have.

The woman who answered the phone told me that because my TV was so small (if you can hear a sneer over the phone, I heard it) it would have to be boxed up and sent to their service center halfway across the country. I tried to protest, but she hung up, saying they'd send me a prepaid box in the mail.

After a week of waiting, the box showed up on our doorstep. It was (and I measured) 22 inches long. I stared at the box, then at the 27-inch TV, then at the box, then I picked up the phone and called them. The only way to get the TV in the box, I said, was to fold it in half.

The man said they could send me another box, but it would take another week. At this point, I angrily told him that I was tired of 1) dealing with this runaround, 2) putting up with defective products, and most definitely tired of 3) my TV going more interesting places than I did. I would make the box work, I growled.

After looking for 15 minutes for a pair of scissors with no luck, I grabbed a big chef's knife from the kitchen and began to cut up the too small box and try to make it work. Styrofoam peanuts spilled out, sticking to everything in sight. The more I sliced at the box, the bigger the mess.

It was in the middle of all this cutting and cussing that the doorbell rang. I stood up and stomped to the door.

I yanked opened the door on a wide-eyed pizza delivery boy, clearly at the wrong house. He took one look at the wild, irate, bearded homeowner covered with Styrofoam peanuts, holding up a huge chef's knife and backed away slowly, as if he'd rung the Munster's doorbell.

"I … think I have the wrong house," he said.

I stepped onto the porch, brushing packing peanuts out of my hair with the knife handle, intending to help him find the house he was looking for, but before I could say anything, he was running. Fast.

Misunderstandings happen all the time. Sometimes, they're my fault. Sometimes, they're the fault of a Japanese manufacturer of really inexpensive flat=screen TV's that break all the time, and the supersized shopper clubs who sell them.

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