The story behind my easy button

03.08.2009 // Humor, Miscellaneous, Short Stories // jcbrady // 3 Comments

I decided I wanted an easy button so I set out to buy one. On the store display stand it said, “makes a perfect gift”. I have to admit this suggestion made me a little embarassed because I normally would view this item as the sort of thing I’d receive as a gift. I therefore bought one for myself and another as a gift for somebody because I thought it really would make a good gift. (That marketing stuff really gets inside your head sometimes)

Before I bought the easy button, I had in mind a couple of ways I wanted to customize it. Number 1 I wanted to make it green because a red easy button doesn’t make sense to me. Red is an emergency color and I wanted my easy button to have a soothing feel to it. Number 2, I didn’t like when you pressed the button, it say’s “that was easy”. For some reason, I just didn’t like it.

When I got home I began customization on my easy button right away. I took the rubber stoppers off the bottom and unscrewed the screws. I pulled on the wire that was connected to the circuit board and the whole circuit board broke. Oh well, that did the trick for getting rid of the audio.

Next I proceeded upstairs where all the painting supplies are usually kept. After some searching, I found the green paint I was looking for. I also found a small sable brush and a larger one so as to cover the whole red area of the easy button with green.

Once I had finished my painting I admired my work, It looked pretty good and I was happy with it. Then I noticed how the paint wasn’t drying and I looked at the label on the paint again. It was oil paint and not acrylic! Augggh! (Oil paint would take months and months to dry)

I got the turpentine out and took off the paint, what a mess it was. Green paint all over the place and on my hands and clothes. I must have spent half an hour cleaning up the mess.

I then proceeded to look for the acrylic paints. I looked everywhere in the paint room and then moved to other areas of the house. I called my wife to help me look and she couldn’t find the acrylic paints either.

I had no choice but to look in the attic. So there I went, digging through boxes and boxes of junk that I have in my attic (no metaphor intended). I found all kinds of stuff I wasn’t looking for but I could not find the acrylic paints. I was seriously ready to break something at this point.

I decided that maybe my green easy button wasn’t meant to be and that I’d either come back to this project or forget about it and move on. I went downstairs and sat on the couch next to my wife.

“Did you find the acrylics?” She said.
“No”, I said.
“Well the store’s still open, why don’t you go get some green paint”.

With that being said, I listened to my loving and helpful wife and went to the store. I picked out some green acrylic (making sure to read the label this time). When I got home I got a new sable brush and started applying paint.

This application unfortunately, was semi transparent (unlike the oil paint) and the easy button looked like garbage. I realized it just wasn’t going to work and I took a rag to it, wiping the paint off. I went ahead and settled for a red easy button but when I put the pieces back together my easy button was broken.

The moral of the story is that sometimes you just got to settle for what’s inside the box. Maybe that’s the key to happiness, not sure. One thing I can say for sure, is that I’m glad I bought that extra easy button as a gift because it became a gift to… (tears and sobbing) myself.

Change the color of the easy button EASILY in this Photoshop CS4 Tutorial.