Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! - Rossmann Repair Group, New York City
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,728 words · ~13 min read
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so a short while ago a gentleman by the name of Ls Rossman watched my video
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where I baked a video card and made a video response outlining what an idiot I
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was he said a lot of bad words and a lot of mean things very often the issue that
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somebody's having when they have no video or something is dead is not an
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issue that you're going to fix by taking a heat gun to it by putting it into an
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oven by burning it so I showed up here
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in New York City at his shop to either
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get an apology out of him or for him to
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restate that in fact he is right and show me his super fancy soldering rework
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multiple thousands of dollar setup that
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is actually how you repair graphics cards or other pcbs properly let's find
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out which one of those things it's going to be
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okay so uh employees only means nothing
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to me so I guess we'll just uh go ahead and head
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inside look at all this stuff it's like Linus's Paradise broken
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Max knock knock come
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on so uh here we are the way I see it
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there's uh there's a couple of uh there's a couple of options here you can
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either apologize and say I was right and you were wrong or there's the much more
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likely scenario where you show us the super cool piece of Machinery that you
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use to properly repair all of this stuff
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uh so this is Louis say hi to the lineus tech tips folks I'm sorry for your right
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hand too oh yeah no no that's no problem
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so guys this right here is where the
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magic happens one does not repair pcbs in an oven one uses one of these that is
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to say if one can afford it how much does one of these cost about $7,300
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about 73 $100 and LS here is going to
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walk us through the ins and outs of how this bad boy Works including you said
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you obtained a donor board do I actually get to operate it oh yeah you're the one
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who's going to be putting this on that's the whole point of having you come here was to reduce my workload fantastic
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let's do it okay so I think we all saw this coming um he's not apologizing and
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he is definitely showing me how to do it the real way so this right here is a PCH
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that was sourced from somewhere cuz you can't actually buy this stuff directly
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from the manufacturer that's one of your frustrations right incredible so maybe
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it works maybe it doesn't and then behind me we've got a PCB from a main
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board that was literally thrown and had
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its PCH pop off so without knowing if
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that works and without knowing if this works we are going to resolder this BGA
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chip onto that PCB I'm going to do it
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and it is not going to involve an oven and it is hopefully going to going to work but if it doesn't then that'll be
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pretty fun yeah it'll be fun either way
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okay so Step One is we want to tighten up these little retainers that use the
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mounting screw points and without uh ruining it too hard that use the
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mounting screw points on the PCB to hold it in place as securely as we as we can
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next we pull out this Fancy Pants camera
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so we get a live feed right here of the solder points on the main board next
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step we turn on the manual vacuum right here we take our PCH we Orient it
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correctly which I mean is there some guess work involved there Google image
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search and try to find the GIF that's above 50x 50 pixels like I did 5 minutes
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before you came here perfect so we put this sucker on the little vacuum right
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there hoping that it doesn't come off there we go so we've got a ring of LEDs
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on the top we've got a ring of LEDs on the bottom that makes sure we've got
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great aluminum from all angles both down here and up here and then what we've got
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on this display are two superimposed images so the Brown version is the one
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below and the Blue version is the one above and the idea is that we use our
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horizontal and vertical adjustment knobs here as well as our angle adjustment
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knob right here to try to align all the
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blue dots with all the brown smudges below
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them uhhuh so as soon as I align it
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there it stops Al lining up there feel free to step in and correct
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what I'm doing at any point in time let's see you can give yourself more
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light so you can see a little bit hey there we go you can zoom in and
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out you got a Joys how far in can we go
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I honestly can't tell but you have no way of checking if it's right until you
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just yeah you don't know if it's right until you put it on I'm just looking at one corner at a time so I see that one's
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the line yeah and the other this one looks okay this is a pain in the ass
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this part really is just a pain in the ass so is this pretty aligned that's
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pretty aligned I would say okay just get yourself a thin layer of flux on there
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gloves and a for the next step we will need Z gloves so now we put uh just a
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line of flux just right down the middle yeah so with the flux in place we use
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this clean room wipe as you can see we are in a completely professional clean
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room environment here so now we've got to check and see if our chip moved out
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of alignment from messing around with it this thing messes with your eye after a
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while man let me tell you are we back on
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I think that's actually good okay I would say this is good okay so next we
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move our light out of the way and we actually lower the
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chip whoa that goes really F oh uh it's
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going to stop oh jeez okay see see right now it's touching the board once it's
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touching the board then you turn the manual vacuum off and then you go back
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up okay so now you can move the camera around and try to get it to focus so
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you're you're almost in Focus okay there you go so now we can can see the balls I
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can't I can't make heads or tails of this image though you got to be kidding
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me here okay the point of this is just
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being able to see when the solder melts so this allows us to see under it enough
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to know when we should apply heat and when we should stop applying heat to
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solder the connections okay so Hit Me With Your
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Best Shot you hit start and you hope that nothing blows up seriously pretty
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much so at this stage we're actually ready to use the information heating
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elements all around to heat the general area and then the two heating elements
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on the top and bottom to solder the chip
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to the PCB but it's not as simple as
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just 200° C in a oven which I noticed
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they have an oven this is high quality right here yeah I I noticed you you do
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have computer parts in your oven was that just to make fun of me when I got
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here exactly um what you do is if you want to clean them off after you're done
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Ultras sonicing it you put it in here to get rid of the moisture before you do
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anything like this you also have to put them in an oven at just around the
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boiling temperature of water just to get rid of any of the moisture that built up
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in the chips but also you get things like popcorn and there I thought I was
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getting my apology after all all right so what we do here is we have these
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profiles and it comes with some pre-programmed but they're not very good
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so you kind of have to trial and error it or use your experience or share share
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online to figure out what exactly the temperatures are for the period of time
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and the ramp up and ramp down for each of those those three heating elements
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and then once you've got a profile you press start and hope nothing catches on
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fire and hope that the solder
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melts so once they melt if the profile is set to run a little long we can
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manually stop it and then start a manual cooling cycle in order to cool
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everything back down to a reasonable operating temperature wow it's really hard to tell
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so is it is it is it is it melted stop
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so we're stopping it now we're deciding it's melted even though it's really hard to tell okay manual Cooling and now you
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get to watch the balls dry okay it's important to dry off your
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balls when you're done any kind of uh repair on
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them so now that the cooling cycle is done we lift this bad boy up is that all
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it lifts up oh there it goes then Mr
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shark grabs a PCB and whoop whoop come on and put it uh that was it we're not
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going to let it cool down some more I want to take a look at it first this is
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the part of the class where the teacher is like you know oh this part's kind of
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good but this is but your attendance is excellent the
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suspense you want to look on that one hm
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you want to look and see what it looks like sure yeah let's do it all right so
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let's have a quick look here so what we're trying to see is whether the balls
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got soldered to the pads uh your guess is much better than mine
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at this point in time let's see if it works so we're just going to fire it up
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and YOLO yeah so here we go Moment of Truth we're going to find out if a fan
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turns yeah come on baby I Believe In You
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H oh we got a flash of light
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and we've got 5 volt so it's powered got
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3.3 volt on another test patch yep no good oh now you have this
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my my bad luck rubbed off on me
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we didn't fix it but um test subject 17A
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contributed to the betterment of our scientific knowledge in some way that
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who am I kidding we didn't learn anything today it but uh thank you guys
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very much for tuning into this episode
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of how according to Lewis Rossman one
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would actually fix something that had
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been if it had been damaged
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by you know something like micro fractures in the solder joints or
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whatever the case may be because remember whether it's a GPU like I very
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temporarily resurrected in the oven because that won't last very long
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whether it's a GPU or whether it's something else there's a hundred things
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that could be wrong with it other than that and you actually have to know
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what's wrong with it before you can attempt any kind of repair so while I
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actually stand by the oven method as a way to put off by buying a new video
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card while you save up for another few weeks if you are completely out of
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warranty and you don't happen to have a $7,500 rework
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station it is not the real way to actually fix anything and I'm glad that
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I got to at least try to do it properly so uh thank you very much for going
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through this process with us and uh being a good sport about the whole thing
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and thanks to you guys for watching whoa I transported back to our
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link in the video description remember guys if you dislike
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this video go ahead and hit the dislike button but if you liked it hit like
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leave a comment saying hi to LS you could do that too you can also check out
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his channel he's got a lot of videos that are uh basically tutorials about
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how to repair your stuff uh rants about Apple and the way that they lock out
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small repair shops from being able to repair their products whether it's
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refusing to put alignment guides on their PC whether it's refusing to
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provide uh pin outs for the chips whether it's refusing to tell you what
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exactly some stupid unlabeled thing is um or whether it's just their business
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practice in general he's got rants about me so if you're into that kind of thing
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he's got at least one really good rant about me and what an idiot I am so uh
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check that out and also don't forget to subscribe uh don't forget that if you
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like our videos you can hit the like button on it you can become a
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contribution through our community Forum now that you're done doing all that
13:32
stuff you're wondering hm what should I watch next maybe check out the video
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that started this whole controversy where I baked a video card and uh did
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manage to resurrect it however temporarily it might have been and made
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this gentleman mad in the process so mad that I had to come all the way here to
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New York to make him feel better hopefully that's not how you feel better