fighting minor frustrations

[calimac]

1. Our tv set has been misbehaving. It was refusing to connect to the wifi on which we get streaming channels like Netflix, although our wifi is otherwise working fine. B., who has 95% of the tv set usage in the household, thinks it may be a lemon. Nevertheless I contacted AT&T, our ISP and cable provider (some people will say AT&T doesn't provide tv service, but it does) to fix it. And eventually a technician came by who fixed the problem. (Mostly: another streaming channel we just subscribed to isn't working right.) "What did you do?" I asked. He didn't really know. "Magic hands," he suggested, holding them up, and indeed he even looked rather like Ben Carson.
An earlier interaction on the phone had produced a suggestion that our router (modem) and receiver (the box that attaches to the tv) needed to be replaced. I doubted this would fix the problem, but I said OK and they shipped the boxes. I was immediately stuck when the instructions for the router showed you where to plug in the coaxial cable, but the actual router contained no such plug. So forget that. I asked Mr Magic Hands what to do with them, since we'd received conflicting instructions on whether to return or discard the old ones. He said return them, which meant take them in to a UPS store, which would ship them without charge to me.
So I took them in. They took one of the two boxes but refused to accept the other one, for reasons unclear. I refused to take it back. I said my job was to take them in to a UPS store; shipping was their responsibility. So I just left it there and walked out.
Then I called AT&T and reported this, and they promised not to charge me for failure to return equipment.

2. For a long time, one of my regular lunches has been a can of menudo soup supplemented with albóndigas, Mexican meatballs, which are lighter and tastier than Anglo meatballs. (They contain rice as binder.) I would defrost a handful from a bag of frozen albóndigas that I'd buy at Smart & Final.
But alas, it seems that Smart & Final no longer carries these. I've checked quite a few large Mexican groceries - a species quite common in this area - and none of them carry albóndigas in any form other than canned albóndiga soup, which is not what I want.
So I found a recipe online and made my own. They're not a match for the ones I used to buy, but good enough.

Comments

[wild_patience]

Re our tv, I know it's a lemon because I need to go in and reset the sound on the tv every few days. It gets so quiet that you can barely hear it at 100%. Sometimes I turn on the set and I get extremely loud static. I don't know what else you could call it than a lemon. Having done a little bit of poking around, investigating a replacement, the problem is that because our tv is much smaller than most of those sold (they consider that size a kitchen tv, which I find very strange), there are few models and their quality is inferior to larger models. But we can't get a larger model without getting rid of a bookcase and finding something larger to set it on, etc. That's not going to happen. I'm quite content with the current size. I just wish it worked better.