Assembling Nonsense, or More Technology Fun

I bought Mom a new rolling office chair at Costco so that she could be slid under the dining table easier.  Choices for rolling dining room table chairs are pretty limited and I wanted something now.  Her beautiful dining table chairs were becoming looser and looser as I manhandled her up to the table.  Good ol' Costco had a nice little desk chair, so I sat in it and pronounced it good.  Not the same chair, but similar:

Now I gotta get the big box into my cart.  While muscling it in there, my soda dumped out of the cart . Ker-splat. Ice everywhere. I had to go confess to an employee. They were very sweet about it.

After getting it home and hefting it out of the trunk, through the garage and into the living room, I now had to assemble it.

 Who writes these instructions? In performing the voodoo necessary to make it stand up and twirl, I forgot to put on a sleeve over the central pedestal, and once assembled, that baby is not coming undone. Even though I tried to get it apart.

 But Mom LOVES it.  Throughout dinner, she implored me to buy one for myself.  Not on your life.

Now I had to tackle the TV.  We had turned off the cable service when no one was living here in this house, but had reenstated the service.  The Internet worked, the TV in the bedroom worked, but alas the TV in the living room did not.  Hmmm.  After calling and going through menu options to the cable service, getting connected to the technology dept, yet still to no avail, they said they didn't know what was wrong with it and I could have the technician come out to the tune of $55.  Had to think on that one.

My thinking usually entails calling for my amazing handyman husband Hans-Dear.  He was in Seattle, but answered my call.  He recognized the pleading ring.  We decided the reason it wasn't working was that I only had the cable box hooked up and not the DVR.

So that meant (scary music swells) I had to HOOK UP THE DVR.

How hard could it be, right?  I had to fuss and fume about it though, as required on page 1, 237 of the instructions, which you know is required reading for my generation. "WARNING: Cable system will not work if owner has not plugged in the frustration cord. Plug it in the back by the heebastoben next to the rebastat."

Then you had to decided whether you had HD-M-16, AK-47, XYZ and several other letters, or ZYX,74-KA, 61-M-DH.  I had no idea, and just decided to match the red cord on box A to the red cord on box B, the green one and white one the same.

I let fly with a few choice words, as required on page 10, 476 and voila! We now have HD, a remote that is sync-ed and a DVR.

Then my phone quit.  Ha, ha, very funny, I told it.  You know not with whom you deal.  I turned the wretched thing off and then on and it surrendered.

There you go.  You may now call me The Bad Ass Technician.  Just don't shorten that name too much.