LED for you, LED for me

Imagine that you have recently purchased a new home. This home is complete with all the necessities, like a grill and a large TV. The problem with the TV is that your wife decided that it needed to stay at a friend’s house until you moved into the home. The TV has to be retrieved. This is traumatic, like when you find out your starting running back is inactive and it’s too late to change your starting lineup.

Oh, wait, that’s not traumatic to sane people.

The TV is back, and your family has the temerity to ask you to eat dinner before installing the TV. Sure, it was time to eat, but this is important! I ate quickly, pouring Franks on everything because either peanut butter or Franks goes on everything.

I went downstairs with my brother-in-law to get the TV set up. He’s an electrician, so unlike the rest of us, he’s useful during this move. We get the TV out of the box. It’s 1.177 inches thin. “Wow, that’s even thinner than mine,” he said. Yes, this is a rare occurrence when a man is jealous of a lack of thickness. We took the TV out of the box. We found the stand upon which the TV would sit. When we looked at the instructions, they cleared stated not to take the TV out before putting the stand in place. I held the TV while bro-in-law screwed the base into the stand. The TV was supposed to click into the stand. There was one tab, with a sticker next to it saying “yes, there is only supposed to be one tab” and two slots. There were two silver prongs on the bottom of the TV clearly created to fit in the stand.
Only it wouldn’t fit. We gingerly lifted the TV and put it down. It wouldn’t click. We tried about 15 times with no luck. In my previous job, it was my job to test test test until I figured out was wrong with an application. We moved the TV sideways and tried to click that way. We brought in the women. It wasn’t clicking. Would I have to lay my TV on the carpet to watch it tomorrow? There was only one thing to do. Unscrew the base. It was the only thing we had done so far and maybe we did it wrong.

I unscrewed. I took the base off the stand. We had looked to see which way the base was supposed to go into the stand, but we had not looked to see which way the stand was supposed to be. It was backward. I put the screws back in and it took about three seconds to get the TV in place. We screwed the TV to the base and we were done.

There were a couple of issues. One is that we didn’t have our satellite hookup yet. That was fine; I had brought my Wii out of storage for this occasion. I opened the Wii box and found everything. Except for the power cord.

There’s a reason why when we’re younger, we move every year and when we get older, we move much less often. We even do insane things like agree to pay for a place over 30 years so we might never have to move again. This weekend was a weekend for moving. It’s not over yet.