Guatemala: Where They Send All the Crap
Posted on February 23, 2010 - Filed Under Guatemala, Simple Life | 8 Comments
It’s no secret that I have a bad go of it with electronics, but back in Canada, I SWEAR stuff worked for me! It really did! I had a laptop that actually functioned correctly for 2 years, amazing as that may seem and I never touched a television only to have it flash the death signal and collapse on me. That all started right here in Guatemala.
I’ve come to the conclusion that they just send all the stuff that gets recalled in the US down here. If it gets too many complaints from North Americans, no problem, sell it to the Guatemalans, no one will ever notice.
Why am I going off on this rant again? DVD players.
When Irving and I moved in together, he had a television and we bought a DVD player together. We got a Jwin. Never heard of it? That’s because it’s a non-existent brand in most countries! That sucker lasted us for SIX years, though power surges, being dropped and moved about 10 times . . . it just kept on going. Then it died a slow and painful death and we were stuck looking for a new one.
We decided to go with a name brand this time. We got a Sony. It quit working within the month. We tried to fix it, nada. So, we got another one, I can’t remember the brand name, but it was a supposedly good one. It lasted about 6 months and then the buttons stopped working. Which was ok, because we had the control. Then the control stopped working, so we got a new one and managed for a while like that until it just stopped opening anymore.
We finally bought another Jwin, thinking that the first one was so good to us, maybe we should just stick to the cheap brands! And this one has been good. Very good.
However, the control has not. First, it stopped working on us. So we went to get a universal control only to find that . . . none of them work with Jwin, since it’s not a recognized brand! It took a few weeks of searching to find a control that could be programmed for Jwin. Except for one tiny, teensy problem . . . none of the buttons worked as labeled. You pushed play and the movie muted. If you pressed 5, it would pause. The left arrow stopped the movie. It was a total nightmare and we never did figure out where the subtitle or audio buttons were.
Irving fiddled with the original control and got it working again and we’ve been using that for the past few months. The batteries kept popping out (the battery door was lost ages ago by little people), so I taped cardboard over the batteries and it was ok, but you had to press them hard whenever you were trying to push buttons. So I doubled up more cardboard and got that working a bit better.
Now, the control has really given up the ghost. I’m sure it wasn’t helped by Dante hurling it across the room on a near daily basis. Though I have to admit that today I was the one who wanted to smash it into tiny pieces . . . nothing I did made the darn thing work . . . only the pause/play button worked! So now it’s officially a goner (the case is all messed up), but the actual DVD player still works great, except it doesn’t have a button to play the movie, the play button only pauses the menu.
I’m getting a little sick of the sucky electronics around here! Now we have to decide if we’re going to buy name brand (which will likely crap out in a few weeks, but has replacement controls available) or another no name (which will work well if no one smashes the control and is considerably cheaper). And it irks me to no end that we’re stuck with a DVD player that works just fine, but can’t be used.
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8 Responses to “Guatemala: Where They Send All the Crap”
Talk to Me, People!
Great post. We have noticed the same thing that everything we buy “name brand” from the States usually has some fatal defect that explains why it’s in Guatemala. That’s why it’s best to by crap from China so that you go into it expecting it to fall apart soon…
I linked to this post btw on Sweaty Petén.
Why is it that our precious time seems to get wasted trying to sort out annoying and unnecessary problems like the one you describe. I too would feel like throwing the remote!!!
In Cairo, power and dirt ATE our DVD players on a too regular basis. So we bought the cheapest thing we could find… it was a Coby (It was $30-40…??). A book-sized box that only plays discs. That little cheapo, what we thought would be throw-away, electronic.. it was, and is, awesome.
Thanks, Jimmy! I just left a ton of comments on your photos of the boys on your Facebook, lol. They’re too cute!
Isn’t that insane? My dad just told me that most weird name electronics are actually made by the big companies for cheaper places. If you get a universal remote, he told me you can just try all the codes and chances are high that one of them will work! Definitely going to try that!
I bet electricity fluctuates a lot in your town. You might not even notice it, but voltage goes up and down dramatically and that kills all your electronics stuff. Did you have the electrician set up the “tierra” for you house? (I don’t know what it’s called in English, but it’s what the third prong is for in most appliances.) That should help you out. Good luck with finding a good remote.
We use a UPS for most of our big stuff and power bars (which die on a regular basis thanks to the surges) for the others to help prevent that problem. They did set up a ground when they did the last round of electric, but before that, we didn’t have it properly set up.