Nothing is ever easy

Life comes at you really slow, but it never stops or gets tired

The TV in the living room is on the fritz.

It’s an older Samsung model, from around 2017 or so, sold during an era when the company thought people would only run a single cord to their wall-mounted TVs, rather than 3 or 4 HDMI cables and a coax. So it uses a proprietary connection box that sits in the TV cabinet or on the floor underneath. The idea was you connect all your devices to this thing, then run a single cable (also proprietary) to the TV. It looks like this.

The error message flashing on the TV tells me there’s no signal from this thing (it’s called a One Connect) and to check the connecting cable. I check the cable where it slots into the TV and that end seems fine to me. So I clamber around the TV cabinet to where the box sits on top of a messy tangle of other cords and wires, and I’m hit full in the face by a strong odor of cat piss. We had an elderly cat who recently died and was having trouble with the litter box in her final months, she must have been peeing behind the TV. Sure enough, when I pick up the box to inspect it, there’s a disgusting, sticky orange patina of stale urine all over it. The cat must have peed on the box and caused it to short out or something. The smell and the knowledge of its origin are gag-inducing in the tight space behind the TV cabinet.

I climb out from behind the cabinet with the urine-stained box pinched gingerly between finger and thumb. A thorough cleaning with rubbing alcohol doesn’t revive the box, it must be permanently broken. The question is whether to replace just this little box or the entire set. The TV is older, but it works well outside the present malfunction, and if I were to replace it with a newer model it would mean unmounting the current one from the wall and hoisting the new one up, as well as reprogramming the universal remote. And this set was one of the last models to not have advertisements baked into its UI, which I don’t want to give up. I hop on Reddit and eBay and spend some time poking around, and decide that my best option is to spend the $120 to replace the broken box, since the TV probably has plenty of life left in it otherwise and I couldn’t get a decent replacement set for that cost. I click the button on eBay and explain to my wife that it will be a few days until I can fix it but it will be easy when the part arrives.

But cat pee needs to be dealt with now. My wife and I have a pretty strict division of labor around the house, and the cats are under my domain, so unlike other cleaning jobs this one falls to me. The old urine residue is a sticky morass congealed on all of the cords tangled on the carpet, each of which needs to be wiped clean individually. Then the carpet itself needs to be scrubbed with a urine treatment that soaks down into the pad to get rid of the smell. By the time I climb out from behind the cabinet, hauling a garbage bag full of noxious orange-stained paper towels out to the can, it’s well past my normal bedtime, my entire evening shot.

About a week later the replacement component arrives and it doesn’t work. In my haste for a solution I had assumed the box was faulty, but now I suspect the proprietary cable is bad. Luckily replacement cables are a lot cheaper than the box itself, so I order one. It will arrive in 5 business days.

Meanwhile we start smelling wafts of cat piss in the living room whenever we’re sitting in there. With a sinking feeling in my stomach I inspect around the perimeter of the room and discover a far larger patch of urine-stained carpet behind the couch out of sight. How we hadn’t noticed it before now is anyone’s guess, maybe the warming weather, maybe it built up to some critical mass, maybe we’d been smelling it for months without knowing what it was, who knows. I need to clean up this mess too, but it’s obviously far more extensive than the other one and getting to it will require moving our large sectional couch out of the way. I want to make sure I get it all while I’m back there, so I do some more research online and discover that dried cat urine glows fluorescent under black light because of phosphorous compounds. There are hundreds of nearly identical variants of black light flashlights sold on amazon for this purpose, all of which presumably originate from a handful of factories in the same industrial block of Shenzhen. I one-click one more or less at random, and thanks to the miracle of prime it will arrive tomorrow morning.

Bezos is as good as his word, and the next evening after work I dim the lights and shine my newly acquired UV lamp back behind the couch. It looks like one of those lurid crime scene investigation photos back there, with the one huge patch I already identified glowing with sinister orange light and other smaller patches shining more dimly, maybe because they’re older. This is way worse than I thought. I muscle the couch out of the way and get to work scrubbing with the cleaning products I had my wife pick up from the drugstore. We own a carpet shampooer, the kind that looks like an oversized vacuum cleaner with more attachments, and I use that to hoover up a nauseating dark-orange liquid once the cleaners have soaked in for a while. Hours later, I move the couch back and shower the piss stink off of me before dropping into bed for the evening. The next night, I move the couch away from the wall and do it all over again because the smell isn’t all gone. I think it’s better now, but it’s hard to tell over the fragrances they add to the carpet cleaning solution.

A few days later the new proprietary TV cable arrives in the mail. I test it out with the old connection box and the new one, and it works fine with both. All that remains is to route it behind the drywall, using the conduit access I installed years ago when I originally wall-mounted this TV. Yanking the old cable out from behind the wall is easy enough, but getting the new one in requires a tool called a fish tape. It’s basically like a stiffer, narrower version of a measuring tape, meant to shove under carpets and behind drywall in situations like this. You fish it through from one end to the other, then you attach the cable you want to run to the end and retract it. I’ve used them lots of times before and they work great.

But I can’t find mine. It’s been a few years since I last required its services, and the place on my peg board where it should hang is barren. I dig around in a few other likely places I might have stashed it but come up empty. It’s missing.

Plan B: use a tape measure. It’s basically a much worse version of the same thing that cuts your finger with its sharp edges, but it’s my best option if I don’t want to wait for another amazon delivery. I unspool the ancient 25’ tape reel inherited from my dad, the strongest one I own, and jam it into the cavity in the drywall behind the TV. The tape keeps buckling against bits of insulation and other mysterious obstructions behind the drywall because I’m using it in a manner wildly inconsistent with its intended purpose, but eventually I manage to get it all the way down to the baseboard. I nestle the end of the new cable in the tape’s slight concavity, then cocoon the entire mess in electrical tape. I yank it back up through the wall, cut off the electrical tape, and connect the cable to the TV.

It’s fixed. My dependents thank me profusely and we watch an episode of Adventure Time to celebrate. Tonight I am the hero they believe me to be.

But the other problem I discovered while repairing the TV remains. The kids don’t notice the attenuated but still all-too-present cat-piss funk, but my wife does. I do too. When the kids are in bed, we talk it over: the carpet was old when we bought this house years ago. This is the final straw. Let’s replace it.

We visit a local showroom, bring home some samples. We dicker over minute color differences for weeks, call back and forth with the shop. They want to send out a second measurer for a final estimate, the first guy wasn’t precise enough. The sales guy is named Jayden or something and is about 11 years old, and when discussing quotes he keeps using a pocket calculator to convert price per yard to price per square foot by dividing things by nine, which isn’t helpful at all. But we come to an agreement, I get my standard “can you do better” 10% discount from his supervisor, and we set an installation date.

At home, my wife and I now wage a war on two fronts. The carpet project has ballooned to encompass the children’s bedrooms as well, which means the kids need to clear their astonishing assortment of bric-a-brac off piled on every flat surface so the installers can move their furniture around, as well as get everything, actually everything, off their floors. This is a Herculean effort for them and an exercise in almost unbelievable forbearance for us, but they get it done. I need to accomplish the same with my own absurd collection of AV equipment whose cables sprout vine-like from the television cabinet in the living room. Meanwhile, I need to be damn sure the cat piss problem is actually dealt with completely before the new carpet goes in. I have a sneaking suspicion that it soaked into the floorboards, which is why we can still smell it sometimes. Fainter than before, but still there. I struggle the sofa out of the way again, rip the carpet away from the line of tacks that hold it down next to the baseboard, and with a box knife cut away large swathes so I can spray more odor treatment directly onto the exposed floorboards.

It’s June. We scheduled the carpet installation to take place when we could ship the children off to camps (just overnight camps, not death camps). The last thing we want is to manage them while the house is uninhabitable for at least a day while installers move all the furniture, rip out the old carpet, put the new one in, and move everything back into place.

The night before the work crew is scheduled to arrive, the wife and kids are already out of the house, en-route to camp, and I’m home by myself for final preparations and then to monitor the guys while they work the next day. Things have shaped up well, I’m feeling pretty good about the situation. But I think I can still faintly smell cat pee once in a while. Is it my imagination? At the last minute, before bed, I give the floorboards where I tore out the carpet a smell test, get my face right up in there and take a good whiff. Cat piss. Still cat piss. I am beside myself. In desperation, I fill a spray bottle with undiluted bleach and start hosing down the floorboards. The bleach immediately bubbles and hisses where it makes contact with the wood, which I take as an excellent sign. Maybe it’s reacting with the remains of the hydrogen peroxide in the previous cleaner, maybe it’s actually neutralizing the aromatic compounds, but it’s clearly doing something. I keep going, spraying and wiping, occasionally smelling to gauge my progress, when I suddenly realize I’m not feeling well. I recall that cat urine has ammonia in it, which when combined with bleach yields chloramine gas. I have trench-gassed myself, I could be moments from permanent lung damage or death. I rush outside for some deep breathing for a few minutes, then sprint back inside holding my breath to fling open all the windows and doors. For several reasons I’m glad my family isn’t at home.

The next morning I wake to an email with the subject line URGENT UPDATE. It’s from the carpet company. They screwed up and double-booked the install team that was supposed to come to my house today, they won’t be here today after all, I will need to call and reschedule for a week later. I should be apoplectic but a wave of tired resignation, an almost smug feeling of rising above washes over me. The store owner is chagrined, I am magnanimous, stern but unflappable, incandescent in my righteousness.

Weeks later, the family is enjoying our plush new carpet, which is major upgrade from the terrible old stuff we replaced, when I realize that I still have a perfectly good Samsung One Connect box from my abortive repair over a month ago. Those things aren’t exactly cheap, and it won’t hold its value forever, so I log back onto eBay to list it for sale. Part of me insists that I’m far too wealthy to worry about recouping around $100 in unused electronics, but the thing about money is that $60 fills your gas tank whether you have $1,000 in the bank or millions. I wasn’t raised with money to spare, so even now that I have a lot I can’t just let things like this go. I list it for $110, and a couple days later accept an offer for $90, which is close enough for me to feel good about the deal.

I arrive to the post office with the device packaged in a spare Amazon box and show them the QR code eBay gave me, which they are supposed to exchange for a shipping label. The androgynous but earnest clerk tells me the system which does this is down, but he/she/they tells me it’s possible that the branch a few miles away has a working system. Knowing what I do about computers I think this is very unlikely, but I’m a foolish optimist so I drive to the other branch and wait in line to have them tell me no, their QR code system is down too. So I drive back home, cancel the shipping label I already purchased, navigate the preferences menu to choose “Print at Home” instead of “Convenient QR Code” as my default shipping label method, buy a new one, print it out, and shellac it to the amazon box with clear packing tape.

I laugh darkly to myself as I drive to the post office for the third time that day. Sure the course of true love never did run smooth, but that old wigged fop was far too specific, nothing ever runs smooth period, nothing in my house is actually square or plumb, no software package comes without three fatal flaws that would be hilarious to someone who didn’t need to integrate it into a production-critical system, one of the kids is always puking on their sheets in the middle of the night. I’ve lived a truly charmed and easy life by any historical or geographical standard, and still bullshit and inconvenience vex me at every turn, vital jobs stack up quicker than they can possibly be addressed, it never stops and won’t until I’m dead. I’m shaking my head ruefully as I pull into the parking lot at the original post office, another wave of smug high-ground martyrdom cresting over me.

The line to the counter is blessedly short.