Another experience to ponder, this one started out with me coming into the living room that resembled the one during my teen age years. I wanted to watch TV, when I went to turn on the TV, the model of TV that was in place was a different one then the one that my family had.

The model looked like a 2000’s flat screen version, something that didn’t exist back when I was a teen. On the right side of the T.V was a record turntable and on the left side of the TV was a radio similar to a cathode tube radio.

The Cathode tube radio on the left, the flat screen TV in the middle and the record turntable on the right, looked like that were joined together as one unit. It almost looked like a radio gram that you’d see in the 1970’s, the exception being the flat screen T.V in the middle.

I had a remote control and used it to turn on the T.V, but the TV screen was transmitting in black and white. I started playing with the controls to get the TV to transmit in color.

I was successful in finding the right control combination for the TV to transmit in color. But the problem was when you’d turn off the TV, and turned it back on, it reverted to black and white transmission. Then, I remembered that my Grandmother’s TV used to have a button where you can switch up the TV transmission from black and white to color, and vice versa. I looked for such a button and found it. I pressed the button for the TV to stay in the colored picture mode.

So now that the TV is transmitting in color, the screen still did not look good. The quality of the colored transmission looked poor. It looks like the T.V needs to be degaussed. But when I saw a button on the TV to control the color quality, I understood that degaussing the TV will not be necessary.  

At first, the button was a regular one where there is a low, high and in between setting. Even though I put the button on each setting, the picture just wouldn’t look right. Then the control button turned into something that looked like an equalizer. There were three equalizers and when I balanced each of them, the TV’s color transmission became perfect.

So now that the TV was transmitting well, I head my father calling me. He wanted me to help him take the old TV downstairs and put it out on the side walk for the Sanitation men to take it away.

The TV was one of those that sold during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, big screen (small by today’s standards) embedded in a large wooden frame. It was heavy to pick up, and my father is not as young as he was to handle it alone.

I thought that I was going to help him, but found that the heavy TV was light, so I put it on my back and made my way downstairs.

When I was going downstairs with the TV on my back, and as I was coming out the door, I saw the upstairs neighbor coming downstairs with his TV to discard.

When we were outside, we saw that the side of the building next door was dug up. I could see rats coming out of the holes in the dirt. Once the rats were on top of the dirt, there were three men with bamboo sticks that struck the rats killing them as they emerged on the dirt surface.     

 I saw that these men were professionals killing rats with their sticks. The next scene was that they went in the basement of my building, and managed to lure the rats in a large container, they went around to the other buildings and managed to get the rats from the other buildings in that same large container, then they set the rats on fire, if any rat survived, it wasn’t long before they died…

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