Doohickeys, plugs pose tribulations

Published 4:00 am Saturday, January 8, 2011

I am a failure at being a modern human.

How do I know this? Because my husband played two days of the video game “Civilization” with an army of pink soldiers.

See, he had a minor surgery on his leg recently that left him couch-bound for a few days. Because I didn’t want to have to entertain him AND our kids at the same time, I opted to move his Xbox (that’s an expensive machine guys use to pretend to shoot things) from his upstairs lair to the downstairs TV.

But hooking up a piece of modern entertainment equipment to a modern TV proved beyond my skill, a fact I unfortunately realized while I was contorted in an unnatural position behind our TV stand, fighting for space with dust bunnies the size of Pomeranians.

“There are five plug-ins back here, but only three plugs from the Xbox,” I shout to the couch.

“Use the RYW.”

“The what?”

“The red, yellow and white ones — use those.”

“OK, but into which plugs? There’s no white plug.”

And there wasn’t. There were TWO red plugs, a yellow, a blue and a green. An indecipherable alphabet soup of letters was inscribed near them, including such helpful labels as PB/PR, RL and Y (that useful inscription was on the yellow plug and was the only one that made sense). I got excited at the PB/PR label because it almost sounded like my favorite brand of cheap beer, but alas, it was just another electronic mystery.

“Get the other cable, it has five plugs,” shouted the couch.

So I braved the enormous box of surplus electronic cords, cables, connectors, wires, chargers and adapters in our garage. I think every family must have this box, full of chargers for cell phones long abandoned, wires for connecting cameras and VCRs and TVs and game consoles that no longer work and, in some cases, no longer even exist.

Why do we hold onto this stuff? In my case it’s largely because I have forgotten what most of these accessories go to and I am afraid that if I toss anything out, the next day I will realize I needed that obscure cord to connect some high-tech gadget to some other electronic doohickey. So each year, I add more cords and the box gets bigger. (It has already graduated from a shoebox to a sweater box to a plastic storage bin the approximate size of a cathode-ray-tube television. Remember those?)

But back to the pink soldiers. After a few minutes of rifling around in the electronics graveyard, I found a cable with the same shape at one end as the one I had been trying to use. I plugged one end into the Xbox and randomly inserted the other five ends into plugs on the back of the TV.

“Wait, there!” the couch says. “Oh, but it’s black-and-white.”

I make another adjustment.

“Now it’s blue and there’s no sound.”

“Is it set to Component 1?”

“Yes.”

“Is the receiver set to DGT/AU?”

I realize at this point that we’re not speaking English.

I unplug and rearrange. “Well?”

“Now it’s pink.”

And no amount of cord shuffling seemed to correct the color of the screen. So the soldiers remained pink, but their color did not prevent them from subduing the indigenous people in the colony my husband was trying to create in his “Civilization” game.

I stopped caring and was unwilling to brave the space behind the TV one more time to fix it.

But the experience made me despair for the future. If I can’t figure out how to hook up a 3-year-old video game system to a 5-year-old TV, how will I manage if we get a new computer, or a new TV, or whatever electronic device is the next to commandeer our entertainment?

A co-worker held out hope, though; she said I just have to hold on until my sons are old enough to do it for me.