Digital Life

When people assume that because you have experience with a particular type of electronics, you must know everything about all of them. You know what they say about assumptions...

I just spent a thoroughly unproductive 45 minutes trying to figure out why my mom and stepfather's home surround sound theater system wasn't working. Funnily enough, they've had this thing for five years. It's been a useless dust gathering brick for that entire time period. For the sake of about ten feet of speaker wire, but that's another issue in itself.

Anyway, they picked a random day (today) to finish getting the thing hooked up. Naturally when they turn it on it doesn't work. So my mom, whom I am already disgruntled with after she got upset with me for something I have no control over, comes over here to ask for help. Which in itself is not unusual at all, but I do get annoyed that she just assumed I know how these things work. Um...no. I know how to hook up computers, DVD players and video game consoles because I've owned and set up all of them many times over the years. As much as I wish I did, I do not own a home theater system. That's what happens when you're in college and work for minimum wage.

But I digress.

So I get over there to start looking at it and they (my mom and stepfather) both just up and leave. Nice of them, huh? Leaving me to read the instruction manual, which like most of them are completely useless, and try to diagnose what's wrong with a device I know basically nothing about other than when they work they are awesome. And 45 minutes is how long it took me to come to the stunning conclusion of...there was nothing wrong with it. All they had to do was turn the damned speakers on the TV off. My father has a surround sound system that works the same way, so logically that should have been the first thing my mom tried. Fail.

Of course, that did lead me to an entirely different issue. The surround sound works, but not all of the speakers do. Yeah...they can fix that part themselves.

Ah, and that problem might actually be solved before I even post this since my stepfather just came back. He thinks it's because they used a different gauge of wire for some of the speakers. Plausible. And not at all surprising, given that they actually listen to what someone at Radio Shack told them. Typical. Well, not my problem now.