The most beautiful serge I ever did see

I have had some problems with my serger. Not that it's broken or anything. Not that I couldn't use it for finishing edges that I didn't want seen, but it was just really making ugly serges. The stitching was really loopy like I took my thread, unwound it from the spool, threw it on the cut edge and used my sewing machine to try to stitch it down. It was so loopy that when I opened the seam it would show the stitches like a set of railroad tracks. I was frustrated and fed up, but not worrying too much about fixing it due to the fact that I wasn't really trying to sew or serge anything important. A mend here and there. . . a hidden seam that was already sewn by my sewing machine and just needed to not ravel.
Well Saturday I got fed up. I mean I had 2 courses at college in tailoring and garment construction. I should be able to serge a pretty seam. I was honestly being lazy about it. I whipped out my little Janome book and turned to the pages describing the incorrect serge seams and how to correct them and lost my ability to read or discern differences. It was like being a preschooler all over again and looking at the screen as the song plays, "which of these things is not like the other, which of these things is not the same. . ." I was lost. After studying it for what seemed like hours and comparing it to my seam and not finding a good match I decided to pick the closest one and try to achieve perfection using that adjustment. I had to serge about 50-100 seams on scraps before I quit and we went to get our Christmas tree. It was not working. It seemed like no matter what I did it was not fixing the problem. I was really disturbed about it now, I mean what's a girl to do when she's done all that she can and the serger is still possessed?
Well in the afternoon my sister came over, and as I was explaining the problem, and showing her my proud pile of serged seams I looked and noticed that one of my threads was completely out of the guide for the lower looper! Hallelujah! In all of my concern over adjustments I neglected to just see if it was threaded properly in the first place.
I realized that the last time I rethreaded I just did a quick job of it and possibly missed some other steps so I retraced them all. . . made sure every tension was threaded through, every guide had yarn in it. etc.
And then voila! I produced as if it were magic the perfect serged seam. I felt like an idiot that it just took a few seconds of being careful to negate a whole morning's worth of work. But I had a beautiful seam!