So here's a funny one. Buckle in. On Tuesday night my beautiful girlfriend Beth and I came home from work, made dinner and settled in to watch the latest season of Workaholics on Stan. Most nights we'll chip away at a couple episodes of whatever shot we're watching, for us it's an end of day unwind. Which is why it was annoying when Stan doesn't play properly. Taking forever to load and when it eventually does, it's blurry and sometimes stops mid-show... it's the opposite of unwinding.

These blurry loading troubles had happened most times we'd tried to watch Stan. And we'd exhausted all avenues of our technical know-how, which is that you can fix anything by turning it off and on again. We'd tried that. Often joke to each other, "Imagine if we could get someone from Stan to come sit with us and see how shit this is ... imagine". So I took to Twitter.

I figured that inviting someone from Stan over for nachos seemed like the friendliest option. It's pretty much the opposite of trolling. And besides, everybody loves nachos.

The next morning, I woke up to an email from someone at Stan named Mike.

"Who the fuck is Mike Sneesby?" I hear you ask.

Haha, ok sure! So Mike's the boss.
And the offer of beer and nachos had cut through the red-tape of customer service. Straight to the top!
So I emailed Mike back and we worked out the details for both the nachos and the evening.

Probably worth noting at this point, I'm confident that Beth and I make a fucking awesome nachos. Beth is a really good cook, and I have more of a "follow the recipe then add chili" approach to cooking. We make a good team. Usually I'm in charge of guac and the dishes.

And we were now faced with the fact that Stan was coming to dinner. Well, Mike. But Stan. Both.
I was also slightly dubious that maybe he was just calling my bluff.
And that he wasn't going to turn up. Was I going to be Stan'd up?
The emails continued.

Shit ... this is really happening! Mike is recruiting his best and brightest for dinner. All the details are locked in, I started to feel nervous that Stan would work when they were there and that I'd look stupid. Murphys law. But mostly I was excited, this will be fun. Five members from Stan are coming over for dinner. I called Beth and told her what I'd done, " *sigh* Ok. I'll write you a shopping list and you're cleaning up".

So Thursday comes. A few times throughout the day people would remind me of the impending doom. Yes, I'd told a few people (everybody). At about 4pm I left the studio for the grocery store with shopping list in hand.

3 bags of corn chips
1 kilo of beef mince
4 avocados (street value $25k)
4 cans of diced tomatoes
1 can of sweet corn kernels
3 Old El Paso taco seasoning
Sour cream, jalapenos, lemon and coriander.

I met Beth at home and she got stuck into baking a hectare of nachos. I put some clothes away and made sure the first couple of beers tasted cold and delicious. Tick. 7:30pm rolls around. Beth and I look at each other wondering what the fuck we've gotten ourselves into. Why did I have to go and open my big mouth? Then the door-buzzer rings.

In walks a guy in a full body hazmat suit. Having watched Breaking Bad on Stan I knew this man. This is Walter White. "We're here for the pest extermination, mind if we bring in some equipment?". He takes off his respirator gas-mask. It's Beau Ryan. Then in comes the rest of the Stan team. Among them is Mike. Hugs and handshakes were exchanged. And I think we all relaxed as we realized none of us were serial killers.

I showed them what was wrong with my Stan. Thankfully, it didn't work. It played blurry and took ages to load. One of the team was their IT guru. He got stuck straight into the TV, while the rest of us got stuck into the killer nachos. Beth had nailed it. Meanwhile a computer flashed numbers and diagnostics, like some sort of hacker breaking into a crypto-safe. "We're not leaving until this is fixed!" Mike explained. I joked he could sleep on the couch if he needed.

The Stan team were all super nice. A lovely and funny bunch. And we all realised this was ridiculous. As good guests, they'd brought with them a goodie-bag of Stan swag and some extra stuff like Sour Warheads... which they'd secretly discovered was my favourite. They'd done their homework. Which panned out well for me because I fucking looooove Sour Warheads. Mike told me about Stan and how it all started. He also told me about shows that were about to come out that nobody knows about yet (shh). And I talked about my art stuff, Young Henrys beer and how I'd recently found out my next door neighbour is a magician (that's another story). Around 11ish, their guru Pranav has found and isolated some errors. It seems the Stan buffering blah-blah router algorithm blah blah code doesn't like my modem. So they reveal a shiny new modem and Mike triumphantly stomps the old one to death and throws it into the bottom of the ice-watery esky.

We search for the remote and Stan is opened. Mike sits down with Beth and I , we press play on No Activity. It loads seamlessly and plays crystal clear. Success! I'm pretty excited by all this. There are heaps of fucking rad shows on Stan, and they gave me a pretty solid list of recommendations. On top of everything, there's every episode of Seinfeld. And all it took was a cry for help and offering of beer and nachos. And it was amazing to finally have Stan come witness and fix the problem.

Beth, Mike Sneesby and I on the couch. Having a tinny watching the fixed Stan.

With Stan fixed, we swapped handshakes and hugs one final time. They packed up their tinnys, complimented Beth's nachos one final time then vanished off into the night. They left just after midnight.

And that, is the night that Stan came for dinner.
If you wanna come over and watch TV with us, shoot me an email.

Update: My phone just exploded with notifications.
PedestrianTV have shared the story. Haha, love it. Great work legends.

THE NIGHT STAN CAME FOR DINNER: #STANCHOS