Bill Horn Television Repairman

Christmas 2016 has been laid to rest, probably sleeping in heavenly peace or harking and heralding some angels singing somewhere up there…. beyond some rainbow.

Whatever.

I don’t really care where Christmas goes just as long as it is over.

Thank the Lord.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to navigate the holidays with the needed finesse that they seem to demand of me.

In short, I fuck them up, royally.

You can count on me…..every Yuletide.

Usually, around the third week of November, I have great intentions to abide the artifice of the upcoming festivities but by the first week of December, I find myself grinching it.

This year, by the time the third week of December rolled around, I was a mess. Sometime during that week, within two hours of each other, my phone and computer broke down on me.

This breakdown of technology was highly personal.

It was intense and disastrous.

And just like clockwork-the bottom fell out of me.

To make matters worse, I was informed by my son that he and his wife were off to Paris to celebrate and would not return until New Year’s Eve.

Alone again, naturally.

Now, if you think this post is going to be ALL about an old, over the hill, lonely and ungrateful 60 year-old woman, you are right.

Woe is the woman who must put her trust in the hands of nerdy little twenty-year old boys with froggy voices who believe they are tekkie geniuses but know dick all about fixing anything. In a nutshell, they didn’t want to fix anything.

They were incapable of fixing my stuff.

They were only there to UPGRADE ME.

Oh, how I long to be upgraded!

I have been looking for that upgraded road for the last twenty five years. But in order to be upgraded you must have good credit.

And I don’t.

It does not matter whether the credit evaluation is internal or external, I don’t measure up.

Where does a woman go with bad credit?

If she is in a downwards spiral, she will look to her past when her life seemed easier.

In my reverie, I always find that simpler time.

It is my childhood.

It is the 1960’s.

It is “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and mix in a good dose of Andy Williams, Perry Como and Bing Crosby.

It is television.

Television has always been my best friend.

Television is user friendly.

There was a time when televisions were just a bunch of tubes in a box and if that tube exploded, you just replaced it with another tube.

Television repairmen were only a landline call away. 

Bill Horn fixed my family’s television until the day he died. After he passed, Bill’s son took over the family business.

We trusted the Horn family with what was probably the first or second most expensive item in our home. There was always a big sigh of relief and we always felt blessed when Bill did not have to take the set away but could fix it right there in our living room.

Mr. Horn never tried to sell my parents a better or newer model. His work was impeccable, affordable and reliable.

He would make out a hand written receipt with the date, what was fixed and an inventory number. Then he would sign it. That signature was his personal guarantee. He was able to sign it because he was taught cursive writing in  grade school.

At this point, you are probably asking yourself the question you should be asking of me. If my childhood was so perfect, why is she so fucked up about Christmas, and why does she have bad credit and why is she whining about all of this in a brand new year?

Most importantly, did she get her computer and phone fixed?

My computer was fixed but I had to pony up the cash to buy the cheapest mobile phone on the market.

And why am I such a festive fuck-up?

The answer is simple.

I come from a fucked-up family.

However, I swear to you, on my soon to be born grandchild’s head, television was perfect back then, it was a place where you could live in your reverie somewhere on “Gilligan’s Island” or believe with all your heart anyone, even me, could grow up and find “Love On A Rooftop.”

But mostly it was steadfast and reliable… just like Mr. Bill Horn….television repairman extraordinaire.