Chaosity (or Chaos City)

My goal over the weekend was to get my clothes all unpacked and put my bedroom in some semblance of order. That didn't happen. It is now Wednesday, and I'm still half living out of a suitcase. At least as of last night I'm pretty sure where everything is. I had issues on Friday when I literally couldn't find anything that matched!!

What did I do instead? I spent pretty much all of Saturday trying to hook up the new VCR/DVD player, and new printer/scanner/copier. Now, I pride myself on being the one person in my family who rarely has trouble with setting up electronic devices. I've either helped someone else or done the hook-ups myself on at least seven different occasions. You might say it's sort of a hobby of mine. I had almost no problem with the printer, though the set-up CD seemed to take forever to install.

No, the issue came with the VCR/DVD player, because I had a foreign element thrown in there: the DVR cable box. Hmmm.

I'll back up. My old DVD player has been having issues for about 2 years. It would play a movie, but if I stopped it or shut off the machine, and then tried to go back to it later, the DVD player would tell me it didn't play that type of disk. Then, I'd have to put in two or three other DVDs before the player would recognize one. "Cleanse the palate" as it were. I'd let the recognized movie play for a few minutes, and then put in my original disc, at which point I'd have to find again where I had been when I shut it off. All very frustrating. More than once I wanted to throw the stupid thing at the wall. The VCR worked fine, but that blasted DVD side...!!!

My parents, heaven bless them, bought me a new VCR/DVD player for my birthday. Awesome!! As I looked over the description of functions on the box, I wasn't sure it would do all I needed it to, so on Friday night I returned that one and asked those clever blokes at Best Buy which machine would best fit my needs: plays DVDs and VHS, records television shows from t.v. to VHS, and records from VHS to DVD and DVD to VHS. Ah, Best Buy. How I love that store! It's curing me of my fear of talking to strangers for fear of bothering them even though they work there and they EXPECT me to ask questions. And yet, for some reason there wasn't anyone in the department that night -- the one time I go specifically to talk to someone! So, I stood around trying to look confident but also like I needed help, and eventually two guys from another department came over. One was pretty knowlegeable, and told me that if I planned to hook up the machine to the cable box, I could get a machine that was $100-$150 cheaper than one I'd have to hook up to an antenna! Score!! I picked one of the two he recommended and took it home.

Then I did something I almost never do with electronics: I opened the box the first night I owned it. I don't know why, but I like to sit on them (figuratively speaking) for at least a week or two before opening them up and playing. I grow attached to the old stuff and want to get in "one more" use, and setting up the new stuff can be such a hassle.

One of the reasons I am generally successful setting up electronic devices is because I read take absolutely everything out of the box, and then read the directions. In theory, this works well (and often does in practice). However, this time there were two different options for set up. And since someone decided that words are not necessary, even to describe what the heck the outlets are that I'm plugging wires into, I got frustrated with trying the decipher the pictures pretty fast. This, compounded with the directions' assumption that I have a high-def television, which I don't. And, of course, the DVD player/VCR didn't come with all of the wires I needed. Sigh. I tried to devise which wires I needed and made a 10 o'clock trip to Wal*Mart. I'm sure I looked a little crazy tromping through Wal*Mart at 10pm on a Friday lugging around a step ladder and a bunch of t.v. connection wires. I got more than a few odd looks.

Saturday I took a break to set up my new printer which, as I said earlier, wasn't too difficult. I came back late that night to finish up with the VCR/DVD player. I managed to get all the wires in the right place, and only opened one too many boxes of cords. I'll have to return the rest this weekend.

So, to make a long story short -- too late! -- I'm all set up and ready to watch movies, DVDs, DVR, and all that jazz. The rest of my house still looks like all of my boxes exploded, but I have time, right?