A Tale of Two TVs

I wrote the following for my boss. This is her story, but she asked to use my words since she thinks she can't write well in English just yet. I think she can, but then again I'm not about to turn down a writing opportunity. She made me erase the last paragraph for her purposes, cause it was too "over the top." But dammit this is my blog and that last paragraph is just SO ME. ;)
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When I first moved to the US several years ago I bought a TV. It was nothing special, really. Just a cheap old 37” color Toshiba. But it never failed me, and man did the picture look great.

Recently my dad gave me $900 to purchase one of those new plasmas for my birthday. I have nothing against them, but I just didn’t see the point in spending all that money on a new TV when my old one worked just fine. Still, Papi’s coming to visit next week and I knew if he didn’t see a beautiful plasma in my living room, I’d be in trouble.

So this weekend I decided to suck it in, be a big girl about it and drag my husband off to Best Buy. I’d planned on spending as little time on this chore as possible. But finding the right TV quickly became a daunting task. It had to be worthy of replacing our beloved older model. Maybe we could drown our sorrows in a multitude of high-tech features. And surely pristine picture quality would help ease the pain. After all, if we were going to sell our souls, then that TV better be crafted by the devil himself. Before we knew it we were heading back home with a $1,700 piece of plastic and neon in our car.

Bringing it into the house felt like telling your faithful husband you were leaving him for a hot young blond. We’d been seduced by the pretty plasma and we didn’t know how to tell him it was over. We simply shoved him into a corner of the spare room and tried not to look. There was no time to mourn properly. There were just too many new features to play with.

But the hours passed and the enchantment faded. The new screen seemed unnaturally stretched compared with the comfortable little box we’d been used to. And the picture somehow didn’t seem that great anymore. A friend told us that if we left it on for awhile, the picture would get better. But two days have passed and I haven’t noticed a thing. It just stares at us as if defying us not to love it. And we stare right back, demanding its cold robotic face to give us a real reason to love it. A justification for the price of our souls.

You see, I felt like a sucker, a fool. I was just another mortal who had succumbed to the temptations of technology. And we can’t even return it. We don’t have the guts.

Sometimes when I’m alone at night with the fluorescent glow of the plasma on my face, a whispering startles me out of my zombified stupor. I listen closer and I swear I can hear a haunting voice say, “But how could you do this to me? After all my years of service to you...” And that’s always when I reach for the remote and turn the volume up.PS: This is not my boss' TV, this is mine (You can tell because Dancing with the Stars is paused on it). I put mine up there because when I first moved into my apartment, the freakin' cable guy made fun of me for having such an old TV. He was like, "You must be the only person in Manhattan Beach with one of these old box TVs." I hated that guy.