There is an old saying that you find out who your real friends are when you need to move. Because there will always be those people that filter in and out of your life grazing the leftover meatloaf out of your fridge even though you are pretty sure it might have the kind of mold growing on it that should have a crack research team from the CDC storming the house in HAZMAT suits. And those dropping off three movies they "borrowed" four months ago including one that clearly belonged to someone else. And the ones keen on hanging out to bitch about how their newly purchased awesome bit of technological insanity just isn't performing all the mind blowing whiz bang stuff they want while you can only think of how poor you are.
But it takes a special friend to come over and say "yes, I will totally break my back today hauling that damned hutch thing no one ever liked and is way too heavy to be built of any wood not harvested on that planet from Avatar down a flight of stairs and into a truck that clearly has no space for it."
Yes, at the end of the day you reward them with some pizza but the moving test has always been the real acid test as far as I was concerned. If I ever needed to be bailed out of jail while wearing only a clown suit above the waist and tattoo of regret below the friends that show up to help me move would be the ones that I would call.
However I propose a new level of friend: the helps the paraplegic with his archaic audio/video cable nightmare friend. And I nominate myself as the first in this prestigious club.
The day started as many might. Out in front of my house there was a young woman dressed up in nice black pants, knee high high heeled boots and a stylish blouse wrestling with an extended pole mounted chainsaw. The woman is my neighbor (we'll call her Sue) and she desperately wanted to know how to cut down this damned apple tree in her front yard.
Being a city girl Sue had never worked with equipment like this and I was trying to demonstrate the basics. As for her being dressed up good enough to hit a singles club (which would have to be far away as there are not nearly enough single people around here to warrant the existence of such an establishment), well that was because she was hoping her ex was going to come by and help her with some other things. She wanted to look good for that. As far as I know he didn't show up. But in the meantime I was there giving her a tutorial on how to cut down limbs with this special type of chainsaw.
As this was going on I got a phone call from my good friend (we'll call him Jonah) who really wanted to go out that night.
I agreed to go with him to a sports bar and play some pool. That itself was going pretty smoothly until we realized that we weren't alone in the place and that two young women had come in for a bite to eat. We'd never seen them before (remember this is a small town with a real lack of women so new faces stand out) and Jonah wanted to invite them over to play doubles but I was against it. I figured they just wanted to eat and not be bothered by the only guys in there. So this led to some heated discussion during which I went on a tear and sank four balls straight (maybe this can utilized in the future as a strategy?) but in the end, after I got Jonah to relent, I promised him I would instead help him install his new dvd burner if he would promise not to talk to the women.
You see Jonah has this obsession with video taping The Daily Show. He does it for every new episode. He doesn't rewatch them he just compiles them and then stacks them in his closet. I suspect if we are ever overrun by the zombiefied-werewolf-vampire-robot armies and future archaeologists come across his closet future generations might mistakenly believe it to be a shrine of a religion they will debate about in their Vlakulen Language academic journals for hibt'ly (that's what they'll call decades). Of course Jonah does this thankless (and seemingly purposeless) compiling on a VCR because when he asked the DISH Network sales rep for a DVR big enough to accommodate several years worth of a show that airs four times a week they thought he was joking and hung up on him. But he wasn't. So now he has a VCR that has long lived past its usefulness and on it he records the adventures of Jon Stewart with an obsessive vigor that the man from Hoarders—who still has his nail clippings from when he was ten years old—would nod and approve of.
So I arrived at Jonah's house after taking three out of five games of pool and ingesting a foot long bacon dog that I'm pretty sure keeps at least one cardiologist's son in a fancy college with those frat parties where they try to fill up garbage cans with binge drinking vomit (I didn't get to do much college so I'm bitter that others waste it on frivolities). And this was when I began to understand the depth of my folly in volunteering for this task.
Jonah set up a massive entertainment system in 1998. It is still there. And it has never been cleaned out on the backside. Not that I could get to the back of it even I wanted to. Over the decade plus of its existence the giant piece of furniture has acquired a massive collection of Voltron figurines, Transformers of rare vintage and I think every piece of trashy Anime produced from the years 1987-1996. What I'm saying is this thing long ago stopped being a bit of furniture and sort of because a structural component of the house itself. When old audio visual equipment went out on it Jonah would unhook them and just leave their connecting wiring laying behind it as a sort of graveyard of past cable connections.
At this point I should explain that the reason it was so important for me to be doing this is because Jonah has a very bad back. He is so immobile because of it that he hasn't worn socks in years. Putting on socks requires bending over you see. Instead he just slips on some river shoes sans socks and that has been how he has persisted for as long as I have known him.
So this task was all on me while Jonah instructed me from his oversized chair. The first thing he has me do is take out the old VCR. To do this I have to first clear a path to it. This is necessary because immediately in front of his entertainment center are piles of other dvd's and discarded stereo equipment. As I push this aside I find a thick blanket of dust that immediately offends all my senses including one I was previously unaware of.
So now I have to clean that up just so I can get close enough without feeling like I need to get a series of booster shots afterward.
I inquire as to the availability of a vacuum cleaner but I'm told that there is one but the belt is busted.
Of course.
So I kind of scoop the dust up with my hand and wad it into large balls so I can throw it all away. Then I sweep the carpet as best I can without going into a full on asthma attack. With this done I now tried to pull out the VCR but this proved impossible because it had somehow been hooked up with screw on coaxial cables that prevented it from being manipulated in any fashion. On top of that it was below his cable receiver. So hoisted the receiver up with one hand while feeling blindly with the other. Eventually I unscrewed it and was able to sort of pull the VCR out a bit. But that was when it stopped and I realized it was still plugged into the electrical outlet........somewhere.
I meekly asked Jonah where it was plugged in and he just shrugged. It had been hooked up so long ago he forgot. So this meant I had to tug on it and kind of listen for where it led to.
Tug....rustle...where was that? Tug....rustle.....over there!
I eventually found it plugged into a threeway outlet on the end of an extension cord underneath a pile of movies that included titles like Slumber Party Massacre and Bikini Machete Maidens.
With the VCR unhooked I now proceeded to try and install the new DVD burner. Except the HDMI cord that Jonah had bought for it was the shortest one I had ever seen. So that meant I would have to put the new machine in a new location and run the cable in front of the shelf and it would only work while tilted to one side.
But, whatever. It was in.
"Good work, now the little TV!"
The little TV?
Almost lost in the clutter that I had cleared away just to get to the work area a little TV had been perched on a little stool.
"Why do you need this TV?" I asked.
"I watch movies on it while I play video games."
My brain tried to comprehend this but ultimately let me know that to try was folly. As a warning sign it sent up my own mental blue screen of death letting me know that subjecting this matter to further inquiry and logical examination would probably permanently harm my brain. What I'm saying is that for a brief moment all I could see was a hedgehog playing with kittens.
So I tried to hook up the little TV. Only the new DVD burner had no standard coaxial output and the little TV had no AV jacks.
"Oh, try the bigger TV in the closet."
Yes, there was a standby TV in the closet. Of course moving it first meant moving Jonah's collection Terry Pratchett books. Did you know that Terry Pratchett wrote lots and lots of books? Did you know that Jonah has like every one of them? And that every one of them was stacked on this TV?
So I found a new place for the books and went to move the TV....with no luck. It was still plugged in! Why was it plugged in while inside a closet? Was this TV set up so The Borrowers could keep on the Kardashians?
Argh!
So this meant a new game of tug.....rattle....tug....rattle until I figured out where this TV was plugged into. After uncovering the pile of Assassins Creed memorabilia that hid the power strip in question I unplugged the TV and tried to move it. Only to realize that someone had decided to hoard lead blocks in the thing!
But...I decided I didn't need a functioning back and just manhauled that thing over to the spot on the carpet I hand cleaned earlier. Once in place I hooked that thing up and collapsed.
Screw you friends that help their friends move. I put in a DVD burner for my friend and that puts me on a whole new level!
Jonah so owes me a pizza.
But it takes a special friend to come over and say "yes, I will totally break my back today hauling that damned hutch thing no one ever liked and is way too heavy to be built of any wood not harvested on that planet from Avatar down a flight of stairs and into a truck that clearly has no space for it."
Yes, at the end of the day you reward them with some pizza but the moving test has always been the real acid test as far as I was concerned. If I ever needed to be bailed out of jail while wearing only a clown suit above the waist and tattoo of regret below the friends that show up to help me move would be the ones that I would call.
However I propose a new level of friend: the helps the paraplegic with his archaic audio/video cable nightmare friend. And I nominate myself as the first in this prestigious club.
The day started as many might. Out in front of my house there was a young woman dressed up in nice black pants, knee high high heeled boots and a stylish blouse wrestling with an extended pole mounted chainsaw. The woman is my neighbor (we'll call her Sue) and she desperately wanted to know how to cut down this damned apple tree in her front yard.
Being a city girl Sue had never worked with equipment like this and I was trying to demonstrate the basics. As for her being dressed up good enough to hit a singles club (which would have to be far away as there are not nearly enough single people around here to warrant the existence of such an establishment), well that was because she was hoping her ex was going to come by and help her with some other things. She wanted to look good for that. As far as I know he didn't show up. But in the meantime I was there giving her a tutorial on how to cut down limbs with this special type of chainsaw.
As this was going on I got a phone call from my good friend (we'll call him Jonah) who really wanted to go out that night.
I agreed to go with him to a sports bar and play some pool. That itself was going pretty smoothly until we realized that we weren't alone in the place and that two young women had come in for a bite to eat. We'd never seen them before (remember this is a small town with a real lack of women so new faces stand out) and Jonah wanted to invite them over to play doubles but I was against it. I figured they just wanted to eat and not be bothered by the only guys in there. So this led to some heated discussion during which I went on a tear and sank four balls straight (maybe this can utilized in the future as a strategy?) but in the end, after I got Jonah to relent, I promised him I would instead help him install his new dvd burner if he would promise not to talk to the women.
You see Jonah has this obsession with video taping The Daily Show. He does it for every new episode. He doesn't rewatch them he just compiles them and then stacks them in his closet. I suspect if we are ever overrun by the zombiefied-werewolf-vampire-robot armies and future archaeologists come across his closet future generations might mistakenly believe it to be a shrine of a religion they will debate about in their Vlakulen Language academic journals for hibt'ly (that's what they'll call decades). Of course Jonah does this thankless (and seemingly purposeless) compiling on a VCR because when he asked the DISH Network sales rep for a DVR big enough to accommodate several years worth of a show that airs four times a week they thought he was joking and hung up on him. But he wasn't. So now he has a VCR that has long lived past its usefulness and on it he records the adventures of Jon Stewart with an obsessive vigor that the man from Hoarders—who still has his nail clippings from when he was ten years old—would nod and approve of.
So I arrived at Jonah's house after taking three out of five games of pool and ingesting a foot long bacon dog that I'm pretty sure keeps at least one cardiologist's son in a fancy college with those frat parties where they try to fill up garbage cans with binge drinking vomit (I didn't get to do much college so I'm bitter that others waste it on frivolities). And this was when I began to understand the depth of my folly in volunteering for this task.
Jonah set up a massive entertainment system in 1998. It is still there. And it has never been cleaned out on the backside. Not that I could get to the back of it even I wanted to. Over the decade plus of its existence the giant piece of furniture has acquired a massive collection of Voltron figurines, Transformers of rare vintage and I think every piece of trashy Anime produced from the years 1987-1996. What I'm saying is this thing long ago stopped being a bit of furniture and sort of because a structural component of the house itself. When old audio visual equipment went out on it Jonah would unhook them and just leave their connecting wiring laying behind it as a sort of graveyard of past cable connections.
At this point I should explain that the reason it was so important for me to be doing this is because Jonah has a very bad back. He is so immobile because of it that he hasn't worn socks in years. Putting on socks requires bending over you see. Instead he just slips on some river shoes sans socks and that has been how he has persisted for as long as I have known him.
So this task was all on me while Jonah instructed me from his oversized chair. The first thing he has me do is take out the old VCR. To do this I have to first clear a path to it. This is necessary because immediately in front of his entertainment center are piles of other dvd's and discarded stereo equipment. As I push this aside I find a thick blanket of dust that immediately offends all my senses including one I was previously unaware of.
So now I have to clean that up just so I can get close enough without feeling like I need to get a series of booster shots afterward.
I inquire as to the availability of a vacuum cleaner but I'm told that there is one but the belt is busted.
Of course.
So I kind of scoop the dust up with my hand and wad it into large balls so I can throw it all away. Then I sweep the carpet as best I can without going into a full on asthma attack. With this done I now tried to pull out the VCR but this proved impossible because it had somehow been hooked up with screw on coaxial cables that prevented it from being manipulated in any fashion. On top of that it was below his cable receiver. So hoisted the receiver up with one hand while feeling blindly with the other. Eventually I unscrewed it and was able to sort of pull the VCR out a bit. But that was when it stopped and I realized it was still plugged into the electrical outlet........somewhere.
I meekly asked Jonah where it was plugged in and he just shrugged. It had been hooked up so long ago he forgot. So this meant I had to tug on it and kind of listen for where it led to.
Tug....rustle...where was that? Tug....rustle.....over there!
I eventually found it plugged into a threeway outlet on the end of an extension cord underneath a pile of movies that included titles like Slumber Party Massacre and Bikini Machete Maidens.
With the VCR unhooked I now proceeded to try and install the new DVD burner. Except the HDMI cord that Jonah had bought for it was the shortest one I had ever seen. So that meant I would have to put the new machine in a new location and run the cable in front of the shelf and it would only work while tilted to one side.
But, whatever. It was in.
"Good work, now the little TV!"
The little TV?
Almost lost in the clutter that I had cleared away just to get to the work area a little TV had been perched on a little stool.
"Why do you need this TV?" I asked.
"I watch movies on it while I play video games."
My brain tried to comprehend this but ultimately let me know that to try was folly. As a warning sign it sent up my own mental blue screen of death letting me know that subjecting this matter to further inquiry and logical examination would probably permanently harm my brain. What I'm saying is that for a brief moment all I could see was a hedgehog playing with kittens.
So I tried to hook up the little TV. Only the new DVD burner had no standard coaxial output and the little TV had no AV jacks.
"Oh, try the bigger TV in the closet."
Yes, there was a standby TV in the closet. Of course moving it first meant moving Jonah's collection Terry Pratchett books. Did you know that Terry Pratchett wrote lots and lots of books? Did you know that Jonah has like every one of them? And that every one of them was stacked on this TV?
So I found a new place for the books and went to move the TV....with no luck. It was still plugged in! Why was it plugged in while inside a closet? Was this TV set up so The Borrowers could keep on the Kardashians?
Argh!
So this meant a new game of tug.....rattle....tug....rattle until I figured out where this TV was plugged into. After uncovering the pile of Assassins Creed memorabilia that hid the power strip in question I unplugged the TV and tried to move it. Only to realize that someone had decided to hoard lead blocks in the thing!
But...I decided I didn't need a functioning back and just manhauled that thing over to the spot on the carpet I hand cleaned earlier. Once in place I hooked that thing up and collapsed.
Screw you friends that help their friends move. I put in a DVD burner for my friend and that puts me on a whole new level!
Jonah so owes me a pizza.
So, these enigmatic apparatusantiquatum-hoarders actually do exist!
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