I "Heart" the Internet!

Do you remember our green TV? In prior posts I talked about my frustration that our really expensive TV we finally paid off had turned completely green (the picture), with a halo and tracers running across it. When you watched a basketball game, each of the players had little ghosts following them around the court. Jeff and I have lived with it as the picture progressively got worse and worse. We were first told it was because we didn't have the "special" magnet blocking speakers in our surround sound system, so that is why the screen started turning green in the corners. We removed the speakers, and things just got worse. We finally called in a service company and they told us we were looking at about $1000 for parts to repair the TV.

The service company never called us back with a firm quote (apparently they are in the business of making $30 service calls, but not making the actual repairs! Grrrr!). We finally got a hold of them and they told us it would be $1200 to repair the TV. Our only guarantee that it would work? "We've been in the business for 40 years. It will work." Jeff and I were left to debate what to do. When I was about to agree to get it fixed I decided to do a little internet research. I googled our TV and found that you could buy a brand new one for $1350. Ouch! Isn't it annoying how much technology depreciates immediately after you buy it? Anyway....I went to Amazon to read some reviews about our TV because I wanted to see if there were any comments on their about people having experiences like ours. Low and behold......

Someone posted on there about a class action lawsuit against Sony that settled the first week of June this year. We are now getting our TV repaired for free! Imagine my excitement. Apparetntly the TV is just a bum TV, and everyone has had problems. I called Jeff at work and told him I had good news and bad news. I told him the bad news is that I found that we could buy a new one of our TV's for about $1350. He started getting angry and asked me what he should break (personal joke, if you know Jeff, you'll know why that is funny), before he found something I told him about the lawsuit. Needless to say, he was excited.

Our TV should be fixed in the next week or so (they have 14 days to repair it before they have to give us a refurbished one), so keep your fingers crossed that everything turns out okay. I haven't let myself get my hopes totally up since it all seems too good to be true, but we'll see (I know I'm a pessimist!). :)

Morale of the story: 1) Buy the extended warranty, but 2) research the heck out of every major decision you are going to make. It just might turn out that there is something out there in your favor.