I’m not a handyman, but I once spent six hours fixing a busted TV. It changed my life
CNN
As a young man, Andrew Torgan was not handy; when something broke, he’d buy a new one. But when his expensive TV malfunctioned about 15 years ago, he turned to YouTube tutorials and surprised himself by becoming a DIYer.
If I were to design a family crest, it would feature a rusted lawnmower in an overgrown field of weeds above the motto, “If it’s broke, don’t bother” — in Latin, of course. My father was an Army surgeon who operated on wounded soldiers, and yet anything mechanical, automotive or electronic mystified him. He’d drive for miles with the oil light warning him his engine was about to seize up. Equipment like riding mowers, tillers and trimmers filled our garage — each in need of repair due to mistreatment or neglect. And if something like a refrigerator light blew out, well, you’d just have to find the milk in the dark until the repairman arrived. Following his example, I too spent most of my adult life replacing things that stopped working or calling in a professional for the “big” jobs, like a running toilet or a broken light switch. All that changed the day the TV exploded. Well, not the entire TV, just a very important part of a very large and expensive unit that was too big to fit in a cab for a ride from our home in Brooklyn to Best Buy for repair. My first instinct, of course, was to see how much a replacement would cost. The answer: about $1,000. But while searching for that particular model online, I came across several posts discussing a common problem: A part of that TV model called the color wheel was prone to failing spectacularly in a burst of light and shattered glass.
Attempts by conservatives to purge state voter rolls ahead of the November election, including from Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, are ramping up, prompting concern from the Justice Department that those efforts might violate federal rules governing how states can manage their lists of registered voters.