I thought my husband was going to have a meltdown today. He turns the TV on in our living room pretty much the minute that he gets up and it stays on all day while he works in our kitchen. I like background sounds too, but for me it’s the radio, my husband likes 90s sitcoms as his white noise.
This morning he got up and turned on the morning news. The picture came on just fine, but there was no sound. I’m assuming that he tried turning off the TV multiple times, he probably used every single remote we have (why do we have SO many remotes?!?). But the sound just didn’t come on.
And I will give him credit — I had no idea that the TV wasn’t working for a couple hours. I was shut in my home “office” working away. If there was any bad words or ugly crying, I didn’t notice a thing.
After a few hours of repeatedly disconnecting the cable box, re-plugging in wires and trying to reboot the system with no success, my husband finally decided to call Verizon. Well, they must have been getting a ton of calls today, because their automated system said the wait time was much longer than normal – like hours. He tried to schedule an appointment for them to call back when there was a rep available, but he couldn’t get a time slot until tomorrow.
But my husband must have really wanted his TV back, because he waited on hold with Verizon for 3 hours! And I’m not exaggerating. He left our house phone (yes, we still have one of those, can you imagine??) on speaker and continued to work at his computer while he waited for them to answer his call. The hold music was definitely annoying, but at least I could close my door and turn up my music.
And he waited on hold that whole time! And when his call finally came up in the queue, they were able to identify the problem within 20 minutes. The solution entailed my husband heading over to Home Depot to purchase a new wire to connect from the cable box to one of the speakers, but he got it done and our living room TV has sound again! It’s a technology miracle!
And my husband is happy, or at least his version of happy. He’s not smiling, but he has sound back on his TV.
Notes from a Self Quarantine 