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AITA for acquiring a decommissioned animatronic bear without telling my wife and then storing it in our garage for eight months

okay so. context...

I, F(33), have been with my wife, F(34), for several years. we have a kid together. things are generally good. she is a little intense sometimes but that's fine because so am I and at least we're consistent about it.

eight months ago we took our daughter (5F at the time, now 5F but older) to a Chuck E. Cheese for her birthday. standard stuff. pizza, tickets, the whole thing. and look, I'm not here to litigate the pizza because that's a separate post, but the point is there were animatronics.

now here's where I need you to understand something. the animatronic bear in question had a visibly degraded left arm actuator. I could tell from across the room. the servo timing was off by like 200-300ms which doesn't sound like much but if you're watching for it you cannot unsee it, it's like a broken clock that's almost right, it will drive you insane. I mentioned this to my wife. she said "don't." I said I was just looking. she said I have never just looked at anything in my life and she was right but that felt beside the point.

so we're leaving, right, my daughter is asleep in the backseat, great birthday, everyone's happy. and I just. I had the animatronic in the trunk.

I want to be clear that I did not plan this. I am a professional engineer with multiple advanced degrees and I acted entirely on instinct, which in retrospect was perhaps the issue.

my wife noticed approximately fifteen minutes into the drive home when she checked the rearview mirror and made eye contact with it. she swerved. someone honked. our daughter slept through it because she is built different. my wife said, and I'm quoting directly, "there is a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic in my car, Adrianna" in the specific voice she uses when she is managing something very carefully, which I have learned over the years means I have like thirty seconds to say something useful.

I said the left arm actuator was running behind.

...she did not find this as relevant as I did.

BUT. she let me keep it. conditionally. garage only, fix it quietly, don't discuss it. those were the terms and I accepted them because I am a reasonable person and also because I had already started mentally drafting the repair plan.

here's the thing. I fixed it. completely. the actuator is running clean, the servo timing is perfect, the arm movement is actually smoother than factory spec because I recalibrated the entire motion range while I had it open anyway. it took me about three weeks of evenings and one very long saturday. it now lives in the corner of the garage next to my secondary workbench and I have named it Gerald.

my wife recently discovered I named it Gerald.

she has not asked me to get rid of Gerald but she did stand in the garage doorway for a long time looking at him and then looked at me and then went back inside without saying anything, which with her means something but I'm not always sure what.

my daughter thinks Gerald is the funniest thing she has ever seen and keeps asking if she can bring him to school for show and tell, which, no, for several reasons, but I appreciate the enthusiasm.

so. AITA? I feel like the initial acquisition was maybe a gray area morally but the repair work was genuinely good engineering and Gerald is fully functional now so is it really a problem at this point.

eta: I was previously on reddit but got banned for "harassment" after a disagreement about Mike Tyson's Punch-Out speedrun history that I maintain was just me being correct. hoping the discourse here is better.

eta 2: to the person who asked what my wife does for work. she's a pharmaceutical executive. yes she could have just bought a new animatronic. that is not the point. the point is this one needed fixing and I was there.

eta 3: Gerald says hi.

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