How they Get Ya. A trip to the Best Buy

In New England, we like to put "the" in front of things. We also like to comment on "how they get ya." This is one such story and involves the problem of being 1 person with 5 telephones in the house.

I have a simple, and unnecessary goal, which is to have all of my phones ring, that is, with a bell, not an electronic chip that I can not distinguish from my smoke alarm. This is harder to do than you realize, but I have 2 -- both good heavy Ma Bell phones just one generation removed from hard wiring, and both with touch-tone. I do have a dial phone, which is also candlestick, and I enjoy it, but the "ring" sends me right thrugh the roof. In the guest room is an AT&T Trimline, which doesn't actually work. In the kitchen, a wall-model Trimline, which has been failing of late. People tell me they can't hear me well.

The best part of this story is that I never call anybody.

I took a chance yesterday since I was in the Best Buy neighborhood, to see what the price of a Trimline is these days, though I know perfectly well it won't truly ring. $10. Can you stand that anything is $10 anymore? Now, for ten bucks, you don't get a range of colors (I would take an avocado green one, if you have it, and even the sky-blue one). Best Buy had white. You have the buy the tiny connector wire separately.

And you know what else they sell at Best Buy? DVDs. Piles and piles of them.
You know what was released on DVD this week? Roots.

When this was released on video for the first time it was $125, which I certainly didn't have, but neither did I have the closet space for the 8 cassettes it came with. I like a movie that serves as its own bookends.

But today, my friends, it is 3 discs, 1 box, thin as a dime. Or 5 dimes. I didn't measure.
And $39. So damn right I bought it, despite what I said yesterday about not getting trapped under a DVD collection.

And that's how they get ya. Because I could have gotten out of there for 12 bucks.
And I can't get the new Trimline to stay vertical on the wall. probably because the guy who knew the physics of this thing died in the 80s.

While I was typing this, 2 phone incidents occured:
1) someone called, but I am on the level with the broken phone. So I didn't bother. Because you could break your neck running for the phone in this house.

2) Someone's wireless call came in over my speakers. I didn't take a message.

You know how else they get ya at the Best Buy, with the loud music and the slacker clerk-boys and the confusing signage for technology unfamiliar to me?
I forgot to look for Roomba.