I want to tell you a story. A story so bizarre it merits a blog post. It starts with a broken TV.

That broken TV.

I know, it doesn’t look broken. That’s the screen that appears when you turn the thing on. It’s supposed to stay there for a few seconds, and then it loads to whatever connection you last used – cable or HDMI, for example. The problem was this screen was all that would happen. Menu buttons wouldn’t work. Changing the channel had no effect. Unplugging and replugging the power cord yielded no improvement.

It seemed we were doomed to watch the load screen forever.

Except for one thing – I’m stubborn.

I can usually fix electronic things when they break. When I don’t know how to fix them, I turn to the Googles for answers. This particular problem popped a strange result – take apart the TV and bake the motherboard. 

As in, stick it in the oven and bake it like a batch of cookies. Same temperature and for the same length of time.

Ha, I thought to myself. The internet trolls are at it again. 

So I scoured the Googles for a real answer. Know what I discovered?

Bake the motherboard. It totes works. Like, for reals.

This was the advice in site after site. I watched a youtube video explaining the whole process.

Okay, internet. You want me to bake my TV.

So of course, my next step was to consult my friends on Facebook.

As I waited for someone with more electronic know-how to chime in, I got to thinking.

Our TV is broken. If I try this and it doesn’t work, we’re no worse off.

But I could potentially melt the motherboard/ruin my oven/burn the house down.

Hmmmm.

Turns out, the lure of having a working TV in less than two hours was too much to pass up.

Plus, you know…I kinda wanted to see what would happen.

So the hubs and I took apart the TV, disconnected the motherboard, procured a piece of cardboard, and pre-heated the oven.

Upon placing the motherboard inside, I sat on a footstool and stared through the oven window at it, in case something burst into flames.

It smelled bad. Bad. Like – well, like hot electronics. But the timer went off with no actual flamage occurring. About that same time, someone with more electronic know-how chimed in.

A little late but it was nice to be validated.

So we waited an hour and reconnected everything. And guess what.

Not everyone was convinced, though.

Dan’s a hard sell, but I promise it worked.

So there you have it – the story of The Most Bizarre Thing The Internet Has Taught Me. Before this it was about polishing stainless steel appliances with olive oil (which also works, by the way). I think this one takes the cake.

What’s something off-the-wall you learned from the internet (that works!)?