The Day the World Ended aka A Patronizing Blogpost

Because I'm an unemployed and worthless gypsy, I've been spending a lot of time visiting "friends" aka people who will let me crash with them for free. My favorite target for a variety of reasons is my boyfriend, despite the fact that he lives in New York City.

New York is an excellent place to go if you hate nature and constantly want to confront all your image-related insecurities.

I guess it has good dim sum.

My boyfriend, who is bro-lite (read into that however you want), lives in a Frat Castle with a large group of gentlemen of likeminded interests (modern day fairy tales!). I'm still discovering exactly what those interests are, but if I had to identify a focal point in their apartment, it would be:

The mothership of all entertainment centers.

There's always at least one person sitting on a very questionable couch in front of their technology altar either 1) watching television aka sports 2) watching movies aka the Godfather 3) playing video games aka FIFA or 4) surfing the internet. And yes they do keep their modem on an old keg. I like to think of it as a tribute to living in a digital age.

Mostly the roommates watch football, or watch people talk about the football they've watched or will watch. This involves a lot of burly men in loud ties espousing opinions about things I will probably never care about.

(This is kind of how ESPN sounds to me).

I've noticed that "watching football" happens to involve a lot more technology than just the TV.

I don't get it, but they don't get why I stockpile images of Newfoundlands and watch "Say Yes to the Dress" marathons, so we're even.

This story though is about the darkest hour the Frat Castle has seen, which I happened to be around to witness. It happened one day in December, when I was home alone with one of the roommates. He was engaged in a DIY project, the end goal of which was either to hide a pesky cord that dangled from a set of interior lights or assert his masculinity, I'm not sure which.

He had decided that the best way of dealing with the offending cord was to: staple gun it into the wall. I wouldn't have thought of that - but I like staple guns too and it's not my apartment. And I was curious to see where this went.

(Probably).

First, I should mention that the lights connected to this particular cord were turned on at the time. Second, we were chatting while he was doing this and he might not have been fully focused on the task at hand. Which is how we found out what happens when you put a metal staple straight through a live wire.

I'm not actually sure what most of those words mean, but they were things I'd heard my contractor parents say when we had plugged in too many Christmas lights and caused a blackout in our home.

(To be fair, in reality I might not have been quite this helpful).

So:

And it worked.

He was right. A big one. You see, we had managed to mortally blow out a circuit tied to one very isolated outlet. Being extremely educated and intelligent guys, the roommates had created a crazy set of technological dependencies on this one outlet. See the below graph:

To be more clear.

None of which could be moved to an outlet that worked for various reasons (i.e. modem connected to the phone line there, TV was screwed into the wall).

The message spread quickly via text.  While they were careful about handing out blame, I have never seen a group of people so hopelessly demoralized.

For example, when they realized they didn't have access to television, they decided they could just watch Hulu or Netflix on their computers. Until they realized that to do that they needed: internet. There was no ESPN, no NFL network, no Call of Duty, no Grantland, no Reddit, no 'Gladiator' or 'Breaking Bad' on dvd. They still had their phones, but, as they discovered, you can really only Snapchat for so long.

I offered to let everyone gather around my laptop to watched the copy of 'Midnight in Paris' I had downloaded. No takers. I would have suggested Monopoly, but that seemed mean. One of them wandered over to a long forgotten bookshelf and announced he might try some "reading". The other two sort of just sat on the couch.

Here is how the night concluded:

For the next three days, everyone got LOTS of sleep.  

I wanted this to be a heartwarming tale about how a group of technologically-dependent bros discovered the joys of Hemingway, good conversation, and a meal home-cooked by candlelight (by necessity, not for ambiance).

Instead, what happened was that the most technologically savvy roommate decided he couldn't take it anymore. At 11:30 at night on the third day, he biked around to every tech supply store in the city to find the longest extension cord available for purchase.

Which is how the Frat Castle now has a TV/Xbox/DVD player/modem/router that are connected to one very fragile little outlet right next to...their kitchen sink. This has inspired some very delicate dishwashing at the Frat Castle.

P.S. The elaborate title of this post was a modification after I let the Boyfriend read it. Verdict: very unappreciated. His take: "We weren't THAT bad."  ...someone's memory is very short.

P.P.S. He's wrong - it really was pathetic.