The Screw from Hell

Poland. The year was 1970. Our pride and joy, a ‘Lazur’ brand television, sat in the place of honor in our living room wall unit. It was a trophy, secured through a hard-won government voucher. The picture was black and white, the vacuum tubes inside heated the room like a furnace, and the sound... well, some days it was like a concert at the symphony hall, and other days it was like a dentist's drill in your nightmare. But we didn't complain. Watching the Opole Song Festival on it was pure bliss.

 

Lately, though, problems had started. The picture would die out like a candle in a draft, and the speaker would emit strange noises—sometimes like a rustling newspaper, other times like someone was shooting at mice inside a pickle tin. The neighborhood diagnoses varied, from "radioactive interference from the West" to "ghosts from Radio Free Europe."

 

And then, he appeared: my father-in-law. A man with a gaze as piercing as an oscilloscope. He looked the set over, scratched his head, and declared with the certainty of a battlefield surgeon:

 

“A screw’s come loose.”

 

A moment later, he returned with a suitcase full of tools he claimed to have bought "for rubles, in Stalingrad, back when you could get a deal." He proceeded to tighten everything: screws, bolts, nuts, and a component that looked like a tiny transformer but could have just as easily been a can opener.

 

The result? A catastrophe. When we switched it on, the screen gave off only a faint, mournful glow, and the sound was gone entirely. Not even a whisper from the great beyond. Dead silence. And in that silence stood my father-in-law, who, avoiding all eye contact, grabbed his coat, muttered a quiet, “Must be one of those new solar flares,” and sped off in his sedan. He peeled out with a squeal of tires so loud you’d think the militia was chasing him. (He clearly didn’t realize that squealing your tires was a crime against the national economy—a new set might be available in three years, if you were lucky.)

 

Two days later, the technician arrived. A professional radio-electrician in a lab coat stained with rosin flux, wearing the face of a man who has seen things. He inspected the guts of our Lazur and sighed deeply.

 

“Sir… every single ferrite core has been screwed in as far as it will go. Who touched this?”

 

I remained silent. Perhaps too silent.

 

“I’ll need to get the wobbuloscope from headquarters,” he said. “And that’s not something you can just whistle up.”

 

Two weeks without television. The children stared at the wall, I stared out the window, and my wife stared at me. After thirteen days, the technician returned with a suitcase that looked like a piece of a Soviet launch vehicle, and a second case full of cables. After four hours of wrestling with the TV’s soul, a soldering iron in his hand and a prayer on his lips, a miracle occurred! The picture returned. The speaker spoke. The people on the screen were moving again.

 

But the bill? It was enough to buy three new Lazur televisions. The technician said he had never seen such complete and utter devastation, not even during his time in the army.