TV Repair Man- #1 Darwin Award

This next event is probably the dumbest thing I have ever done. Yes, in my opinion, this wins my personal Darwin Awards.
Back in the days when the big dish satellites were popping up in yards like weeds, we were too tight with our money to break down and purchase one. We lived beyond the cable TV line. So it was either a satellite dish or an antenna. With an antenna, I still only got one station, and if the wind was blowing very hard, that one was fuzzy. So I had to take drastic measures because I had to have more than one channel.
It seemed that I remember reading in my TV manual that there was button in the back of it that if you engaged it, your TV would bring in better reception for antenna channels vs. cable channels. We had like a 20” TV and if you remember, a 20” TV body looked like a 36” TV today. This one was no different. The back was so big and bulky; it was hard to get to the back of it. So instead of turning the TV around and doing this inside the house, it was easier for me to do this outside going through the window. I opened the window and took the screen off, and I was at the perfect height, (eye level), with the task at hand. I had a good friend over that day to help me figure this thing out. He has always been a good handy man. Yes… It was a meeting of the minds that day. My tool for the day was a paper clip. Standing in a mud puddle, and my faithful buddy behind me, I carefully put the paper clip in a little hole in the back of the TV. For some reason, my friend without warning hit me as hard as he could in the middle of my back. It felt like he had taken a sledge hammer and hit me with it. I didn’t know if I had a spider on me or what, so with the paper clip still in my hand and in the little hole of the TV, I turned and looked at him with a look of “why did you hit me?” He just stood there looking at me all innocent with a look of, “what the H… are you looking at me like that for?” Suddenly, while I’m looking at him, he hits me again even harder than the first time, and somehow, he never moved a muscle. So now my slow simple brain is trying to figure out this optical illusion of, “how in the world did he hit me without ever moving a muscle?” Reality finally sunk in when I felt a stinging sensation sizzling from my fingertips and up both of my arms until it landed in the middle of my chest with a crash. It felt like my heart was going to explode, and I finally pulled the paper clip out of the TV.
It wasn't too long after that day that we purchased a Satellite Antenna.

My Personal Darwin Awards

For the next few blogs, I hope to share with you "My personal Darwin Awards" There are several stupid things I've done in my life that some would say that I had "A Blond moment".


Fire-Fighter Uniform:

Kristie was six years old and Nick was only just 4 months old. It was a cold mid-February evening around 9:00 pm and I was working graveyard shift and was getting ready for work that night. I was in the middle of a shower when I heard a loud scream coming from the kitchen followed by the electricity shutting off. I jumped out of the shower in a panic and headed down the dark hall. I could see flames coming from the kitchen. See my wife had supposedly put some baby bottle nipples on the stove to boil. Well, she turned on the wrong burner. Instead of the pot with the nipples, she accidentally turned on the burner to the pot that we use to cook French fries in. This pot of grease always has a lid on it when not in use. Needless to say, it didn’t take very long for this to go up in flames.
With our kitchen in flames, I instructed my wife to take the kids out to my truck and wait for me. I grabbed the first blanket I could find to smother the fire, (which was Tammie’s best and favorite blanket), but I was in a panic to get this fire out and wasn’t paying any attention to anything else except the fire. Without hesitation, I picked up the flaming pot and move it to the floor. I didn’t feel a thing at the time, but noticed I had severe burns on my hands later. It’s a wonder I didn’t pass out from smoke inhalation. God was definitely breathing for me that day. After I got the fire under control, I headed for the door to go outside. I opened the door, and suddenly felt a cold brisk wind hit my body. Once my brain nerves figured out what was wrong and shared the data with me, I realized that I was standing butt naked at my front door. I knew that it was just a matter of time before I passed out from the smoke inhalation, but there was no way I was going to be on the late night news in this form. So, coughing hysterically, I crawled to my bedroom and grabbed some warm ups from my chest of drawers and crawled outside to safety.
Now, here comes the time of stupidity. I bet we sat in my truck over an hour waiting for the fire department to show up, the whole time thinking, “This Fire Department sure is slow.” Then it suddenly occurred to me, “maybe, just maybe, if the fire department knew about the fire, then they might just show up.”