The television antenna

We do not have television. We have a television set, but we have no channels. The last time we had channels was in 2002 for a few months. Dave's brother decided that we needed an antenna, since we had a TV, so he bought us one. We hooked it up for a while. I watched Survivor and Friends every Thursday. Before that we had never had television since we got married in 1993.

Yesterday, we were bored. We didn't want to rent a movie, since there wasn't anything exciting in the video store. We couldn't go anywhere because our son was sleeping. We had done next to nothing all day on Dave's day off. So we decided to try to get a channel on our TV. I went to the basement and dug out the antenna. We set it on top of the TV and plugged it in.

We spent about 10 min. Figuring out that we had to turn off the cable function on our television before we could get it to work. Then we spent another 10 min. twiddling with the antenna while switching channels, trying to find a channel with a signal. Finally, we found it! Channel 11 had wavy lines, not just static! I left Dave to fiddle with the antenna and when I came back we had vague images moving across the screen. Yes, they were black and white, yes they were blurry, but you could see that there was something happening there!

What we couldn't figure out was why there was no sound. Usually with such a tantalizing picture you would get a pretty good sound quality, but there was nothing. Not a peep. So, we unplugged all the DVD cables, hoping that would result in a sound. Nothing. We twiddled with the different things on the antenna -- still no sound. So I decided to check if the sound cable was properly screwed into the plug at the back.

I took the antenna plug out of the TV. I checked it. It was fine. I put it back into the television. The picture was gone. Even the hint of a picture was gone. We turned the antenna every which way. We twiddled with the dial. We tried all kinds of settings on the TV menu. Nothing worked. Our hope of being reintroduced into the exciting world of moving pictures was over. Dave went to play on the internet. I washed the dishes. I decided it must the the antenna.