What Happens When TVs Go Bad

Girlfriend Rule #1:  Don't mess up boyfriend's TV.

I learned this the hard way today.  Our TV stand is really small and the two television sets we have in the apartment are old and bulky and ginormous.  Josh's TV is one of those that have the DVD and VHS in it (both of which broke years ago) and it's smaller than mine... My much larger (and equally ancient) set just doesn't fit on the stand we have, so we keep Josh's in the living room.  Mine is sitting in our bedroom on the floor against a wall and hasn't been used in about a year. 

Of course, the REASON it hasn't been used in a year is because I finally got sick of having to jump over it to get in the front door of the apartment.  Josh decided he wanted to hook up his PS2 to that set seperately in an effort to avoid having to watch my girlie shows.

The biggest problem with Josh's TV is that it's broken.  The screen works fine and everything is Kosher as long as you have the remote.  But the power button is pushed in and lost somewhere inside the set and when you try to adjust the volume directly on the tv, strange numbers pop up, the set automatically mutes, and even removing the plug from the wall doesn't reset the tv.  Worse still is that even if you have the remote, you can't negate whatever pushing those volume buttons does.

This morning I was trying to watch a show on Hulu while Josh slept after working 3rd shift.  Problem was, I had lost the remote for the TV earlier that morning after the news.  Plus I was getting a headache.  And the set was REALLY LOUD.  So I had two options. 

Option 1: Wake the boyfriend up with copious amounts of whining and suffer the consequences later... because *I* can never find the things I lose.

Option 2: Risk using the volume buttons on the TV and try to sort it out later.  If they did that weird mess-up thing they always do, at least it would be muted and I would be able to relax with Hulu and a bottle of Excedrine.

Naturally, I chose option 2.  So, four hours later when the demon finally woke up, he was even more cranky than usual because his television was, once again, malfunctioning... basically because his silly girlfriend, knowing full well what would likely happen, still did something... well... silly.

All is well now.  My solution was to jam the volume buttons repeatedly until the tv fixed itself.  20 minutes later, television is fine and the remote was found.  But I did learn that it is never a good idea to mess with a boy's television.  Now, if I could only get him to not mess with my stereo... ... ...