OUT ON THE BLINK

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Television sets are excellent machines; the problem is only with what's on them. The sets themselves hardly ever break. That is apparently why it's a lot easier to find someone to replace your hip than it is to find someone to fix your television set.

Washing machines, unlike television sets, break all the time. So do dryers. Automatic dishwashers are even more fragile, maybe because they have a place for dropping spoons down.

Breakdowns dominate consumers' thoughts about these appliances. Maytag, rather than make commercials about how its machines get everything clean, makes commercials claiming that the machines break down so rarely that Maytag repairmen are bored to tears.

The other night my wife said that some of those servicemen in the Maytag commercials who are always complaining about not having enough to do should be retrained to repair television sets. I explained to my wife that the Maytag commercials aren't meant to be taken literally, that Maytag repairmen actually do have enough to do, and that the commercials are simply employing a small conceit as a way of calling attention to a claim that Maytag appliances require less servicing than competing brands.

It turns out that my wife already knew that. This was not the first time I've carefully explained to my wife something she already knew. I do it all the time, and it's never an absolutely splendid experience for either of us. In this case, my wife had actually met someone who was once a Maytag repairman, working alone in a rural area. He hated those commercials about bored repairmen. Apparently, people would call him to get their appliances repaired, and he'd tell them that, given his appointment schedule, he wouldn't be able to get out there until the following Tuesday. "Why can't you come right now?" the caller would say. "You're just sitting around. I've seen you people on television. You don't have anything to do. In fact, you're bored to tears."

The repairman would explain to the caller what I explained to my wife about the commercials. It wasn't an absolutely splendid experience for him, either. By the time my wife met him, he had gone to work for Sears. He was at our house to fix the washing machine.

The subject of broken appliances came up the other night because our television set seemed to be imploding. The closest I can come to describing what happened is to say that judging by the picture and the sound, some person or force seemed to have decided that our television set could benefit from some electroshock therapy, perhaps as a way of calming down those relentlessly chirpy people on the local news.

"There goes the set," I said, realizing that my attempting to find a television repairman would be the equivalent of Stanley attempting to find Livingstone, except that Stanley didn't get overcharged at the end of the journey. Then we saw a ray of hope. Maybe it was the cable. If we were lucky, all of our neighbors' television sets were also receiving electroshock therapy. The cable people, who value our monthly subscription checks, would send out a repairman right away.

"I wonder if the cable people would do washing machines," my wife said. I told her that the cable company didn't have anything to do with washing machines. As it happened, she already knew that.