The Family Testicles

Most of us are familiar with the old gag:   Since the invention of vibrators, the medical advance of artificial insemination and the electrical ease of garbage disposal units, we keep blokes around purely because someone has to wire up the home entertainment system, yes?  Well, I recently had an exciting weekend where I turned this gender stereotype on its head and it was nothing short of a miracle.

The Sperm Donor had decided that two months before Christmas was a perfect time to buy the big lad a new overpriced high definition wide screen digital television set. (God forbid there should be a sense of occasion to Christmas itself!) The new telly was supposedly essential so that at Christmas, when he gets his new Playstation 3, it will be able to perform at peak resolutions or some such techie geek nonsense.

As the big lad’s telly is the one in our house that is attached to the cable box, I was in no mood to argue the point.  Watching my daily re-runs of NCIS in perfect clarity was not something I was going to complain about.

But then came the ordeal of linking up all the bits to this new-fangled telly.  The Sperm Donor lives alone in a huge house with six televisions all connected to various devices so that he can record all his favourite shows even when they compete with each other.  Plus, in his wildly misplaced generosity over the years, he has supplied my house with just as many tellies and vcrs and dvds and he happily installed each and every one of them while my ignorant girlie ovaries and I hid in the kitchen.  But for some reason, on this recent weekend, he simply couldn’t get his head around the requirements for tuning this digital telly to the free to air stations, nor for adding a combo dvd/vcr, a Playstation 2 and a cable television box to the lovely expensive thing.

I tried to be patient and understanding at first and made my sensible suggestions in a polite gentle way.  But sadly the poor man’s brain cells had gone walkabout that weekend and eventually I simply had to step in and take over completely.  Sure, there were many things in the instruction booklet that made no sense to old farts like us, but in this era of fingertip information I was confident my skills as a boogie woogie google girl would unearth what we didn’t know.  And I absolutely, totally and completely refused to contemplate his suggestion that we ‘get someone in’ to do it.  I’m the first to admit that I’m no longer a Mensa candidate, but there’s no way on Gawd’s earth I’d ever pay someone else to follow a set of instructions for me!

Through my research it turned out we were not afterall brain-cell challenged, merely outlet challenged and this expensive new telly could not accept more than one input device with the old style red/ white/yellow pins, and instead it expected that any additional devices would be of the component variety with five variously coloured pins.  (You with me still? It doesn’t really matter, I’m just showing off now...)

So it was I who concluded an adapter cable would be required for our extra device.  It was I who went back to the electrical store when it didn’t work at first, because I knew it had to work.  And it was I who learned the teensy extra bit of information from the darling young chap at the shop which sorted the whole thing out with high tech geeky simplicity.

After my successful resolution of all the televisual issues, the Sperm Donor was actually very grateful to me and not at all resentful or bitter.  (This is the second part of the story that qualifies as a miracle I guess..) And it was a touching household moment when the XY population unanimously awarded me the honourary family testicles for the weekend.

As the entirety of my reproductive tract has been a private matter between my gynaecologist and I for over ten years, I knew the addition of a scrotum wasn’t going to affect my social life in any way, so I was heartily flattered.

My balls melted away overnight though and I had no capacity to take the wheelie bin out to the curb the next day, but for those few hours it felt rather nice.