Well, I went out and bought a wireless network adapter to earlier this evening and I'm waiting for it to install...I think there's something wrong with it, or with my laptop. It's taking forever to install. That is, if it's even installing. It may just be hung up. Hell, I don't know. I never said I was a computer whiz. I'm most definitely not that. All I know for sure is that I am frustrated and confused about it all. I knew I should have taken computer classes when I went to Junior College. Good God, that was back in 1982...Can you imagine what I could have done by now if I'd graduated with one of those degrees?

While I wait, I will regale you with the tale of a recent experience I had at a nearby Wal-Mart.

I'd been wanting a home theater system for a long time. I'm finally able to afford one (nothing too fancy, mind you) so I went to Wal-Mart to scope out what they had to offer. Not a whole lot, let me tell you, but there was a Samsung unit that looked pretty decent. I decided to go with that one.

I bought it and brought it home. We were busy moving into the house, so I planned on hooking it up when we were a bit more settled in.

A couple of days later I decided the time was right, so I opened up the box and dug in.

The first sign that something was wrong-one of the speaker wires was all tangled up, not secured with a twist tie like the others. Upon further investigation I learned that there were only four speaker wires. There should have been six, seeing as how this was a 5.1 surround sound model.

I dug out the receiver and noticed a few smudges on the top. Fingerprints. I was certain I had not touched it.

Then I found the remote, which was loose, not bagged. That was strange enough. But when I opened the back of it and found the batteries already installed I knew that there could be but one explanation:

Wal-Mart had taken it back as a return, repackaged it (poorly, I might add) and sold it to me as new.

As you might expect, I was a tad pissed off. Gas ain't cheap and Wal-Mart ain't all that close to home, so a return meant at least ten bucks worth of fuel out of my pocket. Not to mention the hassle of packing it back in the box and lugging the piece of junk back to the store. But most of all I was irked that they had the gall to sell me a product that had already been used (once something is out of it's wrapper/box it is considered used, as far as I'm concerned). My wife tells me that Wal-Mart is notorious for doing that. I suspected she was right, but now I was convinced.

I took it to the return desk where everything went rather smoothly...the employee behind the counter asked why I wanted to exchange it. I said that there were things about it that had me convinced that it had been returned and repackaged, then sold to me. She wanted details, so I reeled off the list of reasons. As soon as I got to the part about the batteries already being in the remote control I saw it in her expression. She knew I was on the level, and she was most likely well aware of the store's history of repackaging. For what it's worth, I also got the impression that she likely agreed with me that it was a shitty, unethical thing to do. All that from the look on her face.

I got another one. Lo and behold, the batteries were packed in a separate baggie from the remote (which, unlike the last one, was also in a baggie of it's own). Aha! There were 6 speaker cables here! The top of the unit was glossy, not a smudge on it.

Anyhoo, I got it all hooked up. Sad to say but I'm actually disappointed with it. The sound is just not as impressive as I thought it might be. The bottom end is too heavy and there's no equalization to correct it. The remote control is too complicated and you have to be in "stop" mode to access any of the system's menu screens.

All in all I wish I'd saved the money. It's not a bad DVD player. It does go "boom" extremely loudly when something blows up on screen. That's about the only difference I can hear from when I had my other DVD player hooked up through my Cerwin-Vegas.

The only thing I'm more disappointed about is the Dish Network I hooked up with last week. Oh, God, don't get me started about that...

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