Breaking My Playstation 2

Today I broke my PS2. Apparently I'm not good at fixing things.

My PS2 was always used mainly for watching DVDs. I'm not a big gamer although I do play the odd round of Barbie Horse Adventures. Mostly, though, it was used for watching Anchorman for the 700th time at 4:30am after a night at the bar. Well...to be fair, it would have been the 699th and a quarter time if that was the case. Don't you love waking up at 1pm with the DVD title screen looping over and over?

But anyway. A while back the PS2 started acting up with DVDs. They wouldn't play properly. The movie would freeze every few seconds and continue to do so until you got fed up and turned the system off. And recently it just flat out stopped reading DVDs. Games were fine, but DVDs were like poison.

I looked into it and concluded that the lens must need cleaning. So I got instructions on how to open up the PS2 to clean it. And today I set out to finally nip the problem in the bud.

Let me say right now that opening up a PS2 is way harder than getting those hard-shell packages open. I went at this thing with screwdrivers and vice grips and scissors and it took me well over half an hour to get it open.

In the midst of prying and crying and screaming and swearing I managed to cut myself on a sharp edge on one of the pieces inside. It started to bleed and I thought to myself, "Oh no, oh shit, oh boy. This is bad, this is bad." I became worried and drove myself to the emergency room. Panicking, I entered the hospital and I was rushed immediately into one of the rooms where a doctor looked at my hand.

I still haven't been able to figure out why, but the doctor seemed none too pleased with me. I was still a little shaken from my accident so I didn't quite absorb everything he said. But "asshole" and "for real emergencies only" were tossed around quite a bit. Whatever. I think he was just jealous that I left with his last Flinstones Band-aid wrapped around my pinky. And why was that kid with the two broken femurs glaring at me as I passed back through the waiting room? Jeez, lighten up.

After I returned home I continued to try and fix my PS2 only to have it conk out completely. Nothing works. I think I must have damaged the ribbon that connects the reset and eject buttons to the rest of the system. It's fucking balls.

Now I have no DVD player, no video game console, and a wound on my right pinky (which apparently isn't that serious but it so totally IS!). Plus I have to live with the knowledge that I can't fix things for shit and as such, can never be labelled as a real man.

Fuck.