I can't compete with the humor, but maybe some advice. As previously noted most of these aren't a pure series string. The ones I have dealt with have a series-parallel combo with usually 3 substrings. If the whole chain has gone out either the fuze has gone, or you have more than one dead bulb. Seems like that would be unusual, but I have hit it many times. Maybe a line spike kills all the weak ones at once. And have found only three solutions. The obvious, easy and correct one which is to trash the whole string and buy a new one (preferably a day or two after Christmas when they are really, really cheap.) The even more obvious and economical one, which may not play for family reasons is to just dump the whole Christmas light concept. The least preferred answer is to go through the string checking and replacing bulbs. There are actually worse things to do on a cold and blustery day. At least for those of us in the northern hemisphere.