I guess I should have ordered a bigger TV

I am a very lucky guy. Normally when I get a little grief at home, it is about things most people would love to get grief about. Recently we needed to buy a new TV. The only one we owned is a 12 year old 19 inch mono tube TV that I bought right after high school. Up until now I have always had roommates with much larger nicer TVs so why buy my own? I just used theirs. Well finally the last roommate/renter was moving out and we would be going to the 19 inch with rabbit ears and digital tuner box thanks to the government’s digital TV switch program. We COULD have gotten along fine with this. It is all we used for almost a year at one point.

In fact RG watches very little TV; most of it on the weekends when I am home and then it is mostly movies. In fact the only show she watches religiously is house and I think ½ the time she gets the DVDs or watches it on her computer. In fact I think she watches her computer more than the TV. But still I thought it would be nice to get a nice new modern TV. I mean I am over 30 and have a pretty good job so getting a nice TV is not that huge of a deal. Of course it hadn’t happened for over a decade mostly because I was cheap and as mentioned above there were free options! Heh.

So we talked it over and decided we would get a new TV. RG didn’t have a ton of input she wanted an LG but I wanted a plasma, but LG stopped making Plasma in the sizes we were thinking about so we settled on a Panasonic mid-line model. The reviews were really good so I talked her into that brand. So I started watching the market and found some pretty good deals. Of course the part that really made it possible was that RG got a new job so we felt we had a little money to burn after being on a tight budget for 7 months. So a couple weeks before our renter moved out I found a great deal online. I was at least a hundred bucks cheaper than I had seen before so I talked it over with RG and ordered it.

As I normally do I sent the purchase confirmation and email invoice on to the wife and didn’t think much of it. A few hours later I got a call from her when she saw it asking what the heck I was doing? What—What—What!? What was she talking about we talked about getting this TV for months. How could she be upset. I was thinking. So she asked what the heck are you doing – I thought we were getting a BIGGER TV…. Huh? Really? You Think? I thought. I had always figured the size we ordered was plenty. Our living/family room isn’t that big. So we talked about it and yep she was sure we should go bigger… So while we were on the phone I looked up the bigger models of the same TV on the same website. We could go up 1 size for ~$150. So that sounded good. Then I started to joke that we should go up 2 sizes because the next size was only ~$50 more than 1 size up. I was joking.

She wasn’t she said buy it! Crazy, how many wives would tell their husbands to go out and get a bigger TV, 2 sizes bigger even. Well I wasn’t sure that a TV that big would fit in our family room but I had to call and change the order within 24 hours. SO off I went to Wal-Mart, the only place open at 10 at night to look at the different sizes of TV. I also called up a few friends for their advice. I didn’t get much advice beyond Get the biggest TV you can afford. Huh. Well that is one way to go. I thought about it and even though I thought we should go smaller I got the biggest one we were looking at. It is a good thing we didn’t go bigger yet! This one fits with maybe ¼ inch left on either side. the neighbors can watch our TV from a block away, and we sit close enough to this one to see too much detail on HD feeds. So it was a good choice.

A strange and unexpected side effect of the new TV was more space in our living room. All the previous TVs had been tube or projection TVs and this one is a flat screen. So we actually gained 15 inches of floor space in front of the TV. I’ll tell you what – it is great to have the problem of the wife thinking you ordered too small of a TV, even if the bigger TV doesn’t get used any more than the little one!