Now seeing I live with my sister, and being the oldest and dare I say it more responsible of the two of us when it comes to household duties, I seem to have involuntarily assumed the position of honorary male of the house which involves, among other things: taking out the rubbish, changing the lights, cleaning the gutters and fixing electrical appliances.

Just the other night in fact, my sister and I experienced quite a horrifying situation whereby she had bought a number of feelgood dvds home from the video store (interesting that we still refer to it as a video store, rather than a dvd store…sorry, I digress), and lo and behold we could not get any sound.

It was quite mystifying as we had been happily watching dvds only days before. We could only assume either one of our dodgy guests had pinched one of our audio cables or that my very cheap $40 dvd player ,which does not have any rewind or fast forwarding facilities, and which I can only assume was made in a country that does not have any running water or people to speak of, had finally died.

Now I am as familiar with fixing detrimental audio situations as I am with jackhammering a road, drilling a hole in a wall or driving a bulldozer, and I had no idea where to start. My experience within this arena is quite limited, as there has always been someone reliable and very manly on the scene, who likes to drink beer and burp, with which I could lump these very important and manly duties upon.
Unfortunately, I was left to my own logical devices, and the only logical knowledge I could manage to draw upon was my experience in playing spider solitaire and my remarkable reverse parking abilities (you should see me in a carpark!).

Thankfully, it turned out that the people who made cables had thought all about people like me when they created them and I found that they were all nicely colour coded in red, yellow and black which made it fairly easy to work out which bit went where. It was quite fun actually, and took me back to my days as a semi-brilliant child where I tried persistently to stick the square peg in the round hole (which if you tried hard enough could actually happen).

Anyway, if we were being timed, or if our life had depended on the said cables being put in the correct holes, my sister and I would now be dead and the stopwatch would have run out of numbers to time us with. It did, unfortunately, take a very long time. And it didn’t help either that every time I thought I had worked it out, my sister stuck her head right in the line of sight between me and the cable outlets thus obscuring both my view of the back of the television and my incredible thought clarity.

Anyway, to cut a very long story short, after a lot of trial and error (which is always the case when it comes to fixing things you have absolutely no idea about) we got some sound. Surprisingly, despite my honorary male position in the house, I have to admit that it was my sister who actually fixed the thing. But let’s not talk about her. She’s a girl.