Well I did it! I got a PS3 for my son for Christmas. I had a little help from a friend who was stopping in a nearby store every day to ask about them. I had been either stopping by or calling six places almost every day.

Buying one was easy. I was escorted by a store employee to my car. They didn’t give me a bag for my PS3, so everyone could see what it was. The looks on people’s faces were priceless. Setting it up just to see if it worked right was another thing. I could only get a 20GB version. I must say if you can get the 60 GB, it’s worth it. In the set up it kept asking me to connect to the Internet. I couldn’t figure out how to bypass it. It’s a good thing I didn’t because there was a rather large software download. So to get connected to the Internet I had to get a wireless game connection ($100). I have wireless in my house. Of course, my Ethernet connection is nowhere near the television. So off I went to the store to buy the wireless box I needed. While I was there, I also bought a LCD TV and HDMI cable that I had been planning to get. The only HDMI cable available was the most expensive ($100).

So I get home with my purchases only to find that I can only program the wireless game box with a PC, but my PC isn’t directly connected to the router. It’s connected wirelessly too. So it doesn’t want to work right. So I spent a half-hour on the phone with someone at Cisco—probably just down the street from here. I finally get that working only to see that a massive download is required. I think that took more than 30 minutes. I have no idea because I spent most of that time on the phone with my mother. These phone calls can be an hour or so. I get to hear about her teeth at the moment. She’s having 20 crowns replaced. I’m sure that everyone is interested in that.

Then there’s installation time for the software download. I think I bought the PS3 at about 2:30 pm or maybe I was home by then. I was home before 3 pm. Now it’s nearly 7 pm before I can even see what a game looks like on the TV. I’m still working on the old TV. No lunch. Haven’t had dinner.

Then I decide it’s time to move the old TV and put up the new one. These new TVs seem to be easy to set up—plug in and put batteries the remote, tell it you want the menu in English. Well, it’s not that easy. I couldn’t figure out why there was no picture with the HDMI cable. Instruction manuals don’t cover this problem. I finally realize that maybe the settings are on the PS3. Aha! So at 8:30 pm, the PS3 is working. I’ve looked at a game and checked out a video (regular, not Blu-ray—I don’t think I can stand Talladega Nights). The video was giving me fits earlier too. I couldn’t figure out why it was shrunk rather than taking up most the screen.

I was so frustrated before 6 pm that I wanted to explode. By 8:30 pm, it was worse, but now I was exhausted from moving the heavy beastly TV to the garage.

After all this work, there’s no way that PS3 is going back in the box. The box will be wrapped up—empty. The TV will get a bow. I’m just hoping he’s thrilled. It was far more work than I expected, so I hope to see my son jumping up and down when he sees it.