Lights. Lots of lights.

How many of y'all put up Christmas lights? I do not mean just on your tree, but on your house, or on the bushes out side. We do. Every year for as long as I can remember. We also reuse our lights every year. If you have every reused your lights before, you know what that means. Every year the lights need to be repaired, fix, but at almost any coast not replaced. This year we got a lucky break and bought some new lights, rather then fixing the same lights that we had patched up, rewired, rigged and beat into working condition for us the past ten years. For y'all that have never had the joys of fixing lights, I will give you a quick run down of what it is like.
1. You get down the lights from your attic or storage place. (Please note, if you are a A/C tech and work in attics a lot, you are now the favorite person to do this job.)
2. You unpack the lights and separate them from each other.
3. You pick up the first one and plug it in. It turns on.
4. You smile and say "So far so good." reach to unplug them and put it in the good pile, when you bump the lights and half of them blank out.
5. You find the lose bulb and wiggle, flick it, press it tilll it is in tight. The lights turn back on.
6. You plug in the next set. Only two out of three sections work. You sigh. But then you see the problem. A bulb is broken. This will be easy. You change the bulb, it works.
7. The next string of lights work. Good. You do not say anything like you did the first time, as you know the lights will hear you and stop working. You throw this set into the working pile before they have a chance to break.
8. The fourth string does not work. Only one section out of the three are working. No shaky bulbs that you can tell, nor are there any broken bulbs. Time to grind.
9. You pull out every non-working light from front to back, checking it to see if it is the bad link. It is a three hundred sting of light, with the sections divided up into three of one hundred each. You get lucky and find the bad bulb on the 11th light. One of the two small wires from the bulb is broken. You do not know how this happens every year, but it does. You replace it and the ten light behind you and the eighty nine lights in front turn on. Not to bad...Yet.
10. Two of the three sections of the lights are now on. But if you remember from #8 there is still one more that is out. You go to one end of the dead lights, and start pulling them out again. The lights are tight in there and you pinch your fingers often. By the 15th light your fingers are throbbing. By the 25th you have small blisters on your finger tips. By the 50th light the blister have fallen off and the is tinder skin exposed to these harsh conditions. By the 75th light you find the problem, at last! Another wire brake. You replace it. And stare in disbelief. There more then on problem. You try sucking on your fingers as you glare and the dumb lights.
11. You move on to 85th, and are still mad. 95th, and you cannot fill your fingers anymore so you do not care. 100th! And there is nothing wrong with it. You do not know what to think or say. You sit for fifteen minutes and say nothing. You do nothing. You just stare.
12. Then you start back at the beginning trying to find one you may have missed. You get to light number 33, and as you pull it out, a small wire falls out of the socket. You realized that you had broken it as you put it back in the first time when you checked it. You replace it. It works, the last one hundred lights turn on. You are done. Time to put the lights up on the house. You sigh. and suck you fingers.

To be continued in "The Twelve Things that Goes Wrong While Putting up the Lights."