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Our first big test
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On Thursday I wrote a post about Wants vs Needs. I wrote about how instead of making impulse purchases of things we think we need, we are making ourselves think again. Well, as it turns out, our resolve is being tested. What timing!
Around dinner time on Thursday night our town was blacked out for about 2 hours. Really it was a brown out, as some of our low voltage lights still worked, albeit much dimmer than usual. The Thinker and kids were watching television while waiting for dinner. It sort of worked. The image was a bit funny. Then all of a sudden there was a fade to a bright spot in the centre of the screen and a flash. We assumed it was due to there not being enough power to make it work and thought nothing more of it.
Last night, The Thinker and The Engineer were preparing to watch the Friday night football. We turned on the television and nothing. We fiddled with the remote and still nothing. The Thinker changed power points and had a poke around. Still nothing. The television is dead.
So, what to do? My first impulse was to jump on the internet and check out the electrical stores’ catalogues. That LCD was looking good. I was a bit shocked by the prices. I think they shocked me back to reality. We do not need to buy a new television.
The first step is to call our insurance company to see if we’re covered for repairs. I did that this morning and we are (and for replacement if it can’t be repaired)…provided the outage was caused by any of a range of criteria. 
We are now waiting on a letter from the power company.
We are not going to rush out and buy a new television, despite our initial reaction. We don’t actually watch the TV that was damaged all that often, so in reality we’re not going to miss it all that much. Hopefully, it won’t take too long to get repaired.
Getting out of the habit of making impulse buys and really deciding what we need as opposed to want is not easy. It’s going to take time to change our mindsets. But we’re happy with ourselves for decisions we made this weekend.
Maybe it’s time to try and life with out a telly.
When I came to Australia in 1995 I decided then that I could live without a television and have never since bought one. Looking back at 13 years without a television I can say that I never got bored. I read a lot and the kids loved to play board games and card games when they were younger.
Maybe try without a telly for a while and see how bad or not it really is!
June 12th, 2008 at 2:03 pm