Made in America

I bought a DVD/VCR combo for Christmas last year. A few weeks ago, the picture of every DVD we watched suddenly began playing only in black and white, while the VCR still played in color. Aaron called the company, who said it sounded like a faulty sensor, and that we could send it in for repairs. I finally hauled the thing down to Wal-Mart, and a very helpful young lady shipped it off to Tennessee. Quick as a wink, I got a notice from the company saying that the cost of labor would be $45. We paid about $90 for it, so this is roughly half the cost of just buying a brand new one. The little jewel of a thing is still under warranty, so the company magnanimously informed us they would not charge us for parts. I'm going to call them tomorrow to let them know that I, being a magnanimous person myself, am going to let them keep their broken DVD player that worked correctly for exactly seven months. That I paid over $90 for. That they didn't build correctly. That they now want to charge ME to fix.
I hate big corporations.

P.I.

We ate dinner with my mom and dad tonight and drove out to see our new house. Dad loved it out there. I knew he would.

My dad was always doing crazy stuff when I was growing up. He couldn't sit still for more than five minutes, and he was always coming up with a plan to strike it rich. He taught school for years and was an assistant principal, then struck out on his own to do construction. And lots of other stuff. My dad has started his own promotion company (for a country music act that lasted one night), bought a yacht (he can't sail), made a plan to import and export cars between the U.S. and Canada, and thought up a thousand other different ways to make an extra buck or two.

When I was fourteen, he was a private investigator for a weekend. Here's how it went down:

Dad had a friend, Cecil, who was a private investigator in Anderson County. Cecil was always hot on the trail of a cheating spouse, but rarely had much luck catching them in the act. Dad walked into Cecil's office one day and, in the course of conversation, asked just how one went about getting his private eye license in the state of South Carolina. "You send twenty bucks and a copy of your driver's license to this address," Cecil replied. Seeing how incredibly simple it was, dad just couldn't resist. He immediately mailed the necessary money and information and in no time flat was a certified private eye.

That very night, dad and Cecil went on their first stake-out together. Their mission was to trail the wife of some guy who suspected the wife was cheating on him with the real estate agent she worked for. Dad and Cecil parked in the lot of a restaurant across the street from the real estate office. Time passed, and they began to talk about fishing. They were deep in a discussion about the pros and cons of using live bait when they suddenly looked up. The real estate agent's car was gone.

"We missed 'em," said Cecil, unnecessarily.

Fortunately, Cecil had a Plan B. He knew where the real estate agent lived, where the wife lived, where her sister lived, and several other places the couple might have gone. Dad and Cecil began driving around Anderson County. They drove from house to house, but somehow, the agent and his little cookie cutter continued to evade the mastermind tactics of Cecil. It was getting late, and dad was getting tired. Finally, at about 3:00 am, their luck running out, dad asked Cecil if they could call it a night. That Monday, he tendered his resignation with the Cecil Millwater Private Investigative Services. He couldn't really see a future in staying up until the wee hours of the morning, following adulterers.

A few months later, a couple of doctors gave Cecil and his new partner an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii to track their cheating wives on vacation with their boyfriends. Dad has always claimed that even Hawaii wouldn't have been worth it to stay up all night sitting in a car, but I think he was privately disappointed.