A wake up call

I got a few phone calls at 6am this morning from my co-workers. Not a big deal, the power was out in the office. I did some damage control, I think it went well. Speaking of damage control...

Apollo was already up starting to set up his receiver and subwoofer. The receiver did some sort of meter reading of all the speakers to check their quality. Or something. I'm not exactly sure what it did, I'm not going to try to figure it out either. This is one of those things I'm going to leave to the men. I can change my oil but that's where I draw the line.

So one of the speakers passed the test but it didn't even sound remotely as good as all the others. At this point I think it's worth mentioning that this is the speaker that's the closest to where I sit and always makes a damn cricket sound. I'm constantly bitching about it and asking Apollo to turn off the receiver. I swear, it's enough to drive a person crazy. Unless you're already there. ANYWAY.

Apollo replaced the wire for one of the speakers in the room and...ok, I think this is also a good place to mention that we had four speakers hooked up. The fifth one blew out at the Memorial Day party, we took it outside for Tee to use while deejaying. Unknowns to me, because I leave all this crap to men, the speakers were set up in stereo, not surround sound. Apparently this is because the receiver is almost 20 years old and doesn't have that capability. Apollo laughingly tells me that he tried to create surround sound by setting up speakers around us so we'd be surrounded by sound. *insert stunned look here* He's now telling me how he converted a four channel receiver into a two channel receiver after two of the channels went out. He basically took all the wires and poked them into the two remaining jacks. *sigh*


Anyway (geeze, me and my tangents!), Apollo set up the wire for one of the speakers and then got ready to replace the wire for the second one when he casually mentioned that he had spliced the wires together. Ahem. This is the speaker that made the cricket sound and made me lose it a few times. He then mentions that he may have spliced more than one wire together. He starts pulling them out (they're hidden under the rug at the baseboard of the room) and lo...five, yes FIVE wires were spliced together!!


It turns out they're all of varying gauge! Some of the spliced sections were even bare. It's a wonder we didn't start a fire!! Yes, what you're looking at above is actually the pile of wires he used to splice together for one speaker.


Just for the record, the above photo represents what you should see when looking at speaker wires running to and from your receiver. Not this:

I swear, sometimes I wonder what's going on in his mind. He has to make everything so ghetto!! He defends himself by saying, "A man gotta do what he gotta do." Well in that case, maybe it would be better if I got involved after all.