03 September 2009
Torment in digital tv land
Hands up anyone who has aging parents – even grandparents – struggling to get to grips with technology. Thought so; there's plenty of us around.
It was the in law's 60th Wedding Anniversary a few weeks ago so the family put its collective head together and came up with the reasonable idea of buying them a digital tv to replace what was, quite frankly, a museum piece.
Dad raised his usual objection to anything made this side of World War II: "What happens when it goes wrong?" Don't worry, we replied. Today's technology is pretty reliable: if it goes phut, it'll do it quickly and you'll get a replacement pronto. And even if it goes phut after a while, we've bought you the extended warranty. Nothing to worry about.
Guess what? One dead tv. The service man was called in and pronounced it dead. And then the small print came into play. Because they'd had the tv for more than 28 days, they couldn't get an instant replacement; it had to go for repair. Luckily, the museum piece had been stored away.
This wasn't one of those consumer electronics brands that you see one day, then never again. Despite the fact that it carried a well known Korean brand on the front, the insides proved a bit more problematic.
No news from the service centre – and we'll use that phrase in its broadest sense – so we called and were told 'you won't believe this, but that tv could have any one of five different boards inside. 'Problem is', they continued, 'there's no identification on the board. We guessed and got it wrong, so we've got to get on the phone to them to find out which board we should use'.
And now, three weeks after the shiny new digital tv went phut, the aging in laws have been given a code number to take along to the store to get a new tv: it proved impossible, or uneconomic, to repair.
Why it took three weeks to arrive at this decision is, at the moment, a matter of debate.
Now, we've got to go through the whole process of introducing them to digital tv again. It'll probably be a different brand, so will have a different user interface and a whole new set of worries for the aging operators, who were suspicious enough about technology to start with.
Author
Graham Pitcher
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