Another obsession taken care off

For about a year now, I've been doing research about flat screen TV's. Then my son bought a plasma TV for his fiance'. Next my daughter and her husband bought a LCD TV. I continued to do research, trying to decide what I really wanted, what size would work best in my livingroom, plasma or LCD, 40", smaller? Larger? Do I really want to spend the money? After all, the TV in the livingroom was working just fine and it was only a few years old, maybe 7 yrs at the most.

Then one day while I was looking for paperwork on something else, I found the paperwork on my TV and I realized my TV was at least 13 yrs old! Suddenly I didn't feel so quilty about lusting after a new TV.

Each work I would look online for the best deals at Circuit City and noticed each week they seemed to offer 18 month financing with no interest. This is the type of deal I've taken advantage of in the past very successfully so figured this was the way to go.

This Sunday for some reason, once I checked the ads, I convinced myself that it was the right day to buy the new TV. After church, I called my future daughter-in-law to see if she would be available to bring her truck to the store to pick up the TV for me. Off I was on the bike to go pick out which model I wanted and to apply for the financing. Krista got there while I was waiting for the good word from the bank that my application had been accepted. I took her over to see the two sets I was trying to decide between when the salesman walked up to me and told me that my application had been declined! I was shocked! I have an excellent credit rating. He looked sheepish, explaining it wasn't Circuit City but the Chase Bank that had rejected me. The only reason I could come up with in my mind was the slight mess I had with my taxes this past year that my "taxman" had screwed up on me but I had paid them off and the checks had cleared.

Krista and I walked out of the store, stood in the parking lot talking for a while and were just about ready to say good-bye when my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number but answered. "Ms Striegel? This is George the salesman at Circuit City. The bank just called us to let us know that their computer had a problem and you shouldn't have been declined. Are you still interested in the TV?"

Back into the store we went to finish the paperwork with me finally on the phone with someone from the bank to answer a few secruity questions. The last few questions would be her giving me names and I had to identify if I knew the people or not. Ok, I'm ready, what's the first name. Gerald Cook. OH SHIT, why did he have to come into this whole deal??? I told the lady at the bank, yes I knew him. "Where does he live". I then started to laugh and finally said to her, "that is my ex-husband and I don't care where he lives". She then gave me the town and yes, that is where he lives. Next name, Nicole Cook. "yes, that is my daughter but that isn't her name now, she is married now.

(At this point the rest of the blog for today was lost and I can't remember exactly what I finished the blog with but I'll try anyway)

So I finally get all the financing paperwork done, pick out the TV I wanted and start the paperwork on that. After all was taken care off, the sales guy says to me "I'm going to try to get you some money off of the TV for all we put you through today". Away he walks and of course I'm thinking I should get the TV for free, but when he returns he tells me that I'm going to get $50 off the price. I then try to give him a $15 coupon Krista had given me but he gives it back to me and pulls out a $40 coupon that he uses instead. So I got $90 off the price of the TV!

We get it home and set up and I enjoy the evening playing with the controls getting the best picture and sound for my room. I call Time Warner to take advantage of a 3 month price break on my HD DVR thinking I'll have to wait a couple days for the new cable box to arrive only to learn that my present digital DVR is HD compatiable and only needs the signal sent to it to set it up. How simple is that? Yippee.

I spend the rest of the evening seeing what channels are HD and which aren't and I'm even surprised by how many commericals are HD. As the evening progresses I'm beginning to think that the picture on the HD isn't really anything special. It was time to head to bed, goin in the bedroom and turn on the TV in there and take a look at it and think to myself, wow, what a crappy little picture! How quickly I've been spoiled!!!!!