The language in this post may be a little salty. Sorry about that, but I am upset.

A member of my household works for a venue that, every now and again, holds a contest to see who knows their stuff. Based on the accuracy of the answers to some (usually marketing) questions, your name may get put into a drawing for prizes. This member of our household "won" one of these prizes recently, and it turned out to be a decommissioned large-screen TV from the workplace.

Needless to say, there was a lot of excitement, and we had gone to the effort of re-arranging our living room to accomodate this behemoth. We gathered our friends to help bring it into the house. We rented a vehicle to bring it to the house in (we all drive compact cars, so that was a non-starter). We got it home, I hooked it up, and . . . it sucked.

Sorry to be so blunt, but that is the best word I can come up with to describe this beast. It had apparently been deployed in this bar for seven years, and had been worn to death. It has a lenticular screen, which is one of those where you have to be looking at it at exactly the right angle or you don't see anything. The picture was wicked dim, with no amount of adjusting the brightness or picture values fixing it. The colour was way off, again, with no amoung of adjusting offering a fix. You couldn't tweak the aspect ratio, yielding a distorted picture on SD channels. The icing on the cake was the bright halos surrounding everything on the screen.

Turns out, it is a CRT projector: a type notorious for dim pictures and halos. I didn't think anybody was making these since the mid-90's, but here it was witha 2003 manufacture date.

What else are they notorious for? Wear. You can burn an image into it, and its complement will always be there. As such, the blue is wicked dim (resulting in the colour problems) as a result of this TV having been left on for hours displaying a blue "no signal" screen of the type that were so popular since the late 80s.

As I said, it sucked. Put bluntly, the 27" CRT television that was there before it offered a better viewing experience.

Now, no doubt some of you are, at this point, thinking "It was free, what do you want?"

I want it out of my fucking living room, that's what. It's taking up too much space, and now we have to pay to dispose of it. Never mind the dashed hopes. They're our own fault. What has happened here, however, is that in one truly dick move, our housemate's employer has eliminated the cost of disposing of this piece of worn-out junk and set it up so that the employees will pay it, and be glad to do so.

Assholes.