The story begins as I was trying to hunt down a microphone for the Nintendo Gamecube that I had found at the outlet store a few years back. I saw one on the internet that piqued my interested, as well as reminding me that I even had one, so I had to hunt mine down. The problem was that I have a lot of stuff that I found at the outlet store, so that means I had a lot of stuff to sort through as well as a lot of places to look before I could ever hope to find it.
All the outlet store stuff has long since been packed into video game carrying bags, which themselves had been organized and packed away into my closet. The problem is only furthered by the fact that I have about a dozen of these bags, all brimming with outlet store finds that I had either forgotten or never got around to properly organizing. And that is when I found the forgotten Gamecube controller.
I had opened the dirty, misshaped Sega Dreamcast bag at least 100 times within the last few years, including a dozen or so this year. I knew there was a silver (platinum for the technical fans) Gamecube controller in there, I just assumed it was my silver Wavebird, as all I could really ever see was the handle of the controller. Curiosity dictated that I take everything out of the bag that night, to make sure the microphone wasn't hiding under anything.
Once I removed the controller I was shocked to see that it had a cord on it, even more so that the end of the cord had been snipped completely off. "Oh yeah!", I thought to myself. I remember picking this controller up with the hopes of adding a new end to the cable, or at least using most of it for spare parts to fix other, more well taken care of, Gamecube controllers. You see, this controller wasn't just missing the end of the cable, no, it had obviously been given a cola bath by someone, who then snipped the end off the cable and tossed it in a box, later to be donated to Goodwill and shipped on to the outlet store, where I eventually found and purchased it.
As you can clearly see this controller was in terrible shape. I'm assuming that the end of the cable was snipped off after the genius who owned it gave it the cola bath, because the controller no longer worked. Sadly I can not confirm or refute this as the fucking end of the cable has been SNIPPED OFF! After I gave everything but the board, obviously, a soak in hot, soapy water, it all cleaned up quite nicely, sans a few spots where the silver paint had been worn down naturally anyway. I have no way of testing the board, and I believe it may only be a waste of time to track down or even replace the cable, as the board may indeed be fried, although there really wasn't any cola on the main circuitry.
As a mandatory organ donor this controller's first donation was to give up it's Z button to a black controller that I had found (shockingly at the outlet store) with a shattered Z button. The Z button was in 4 different pieces, only 2 of which remain and it does still work, sort of. I will be keeping it as a parts controller, but I will always wonder what was going through the previous owner's head as they not only, obviously, bathed this thing in soda, but also cut off the end so that it could never be used again. Stupid, stupid, STUPID!
This story does, however, have a happy ending. Along with the silver controller donating the life saving Z button to the black controller, I happened to find a spare Wavebird receiver while hunting through the many bags. I also happened to find the microphone!
