One of the things that I detest is people that twink with things

 they know nothing about and leave it for someone else to figure out.

Take a TV hooked up to Dish and a VCR.

Generally the thing that starts the mess is that someone pushes the wrong button and somehow screws up the software. TVs these days are not anywhere near as simple as they used to be and I suppose it is pretty for an unskilled operator to hit the wrong button or misprogram something.

All this is well and good until the person that screws the television up with a push of the wrong button decides that the problem is now in the hardware instead of the software.

The first thing they generally do is start messing around with the wires on the back of the set. Of course they are not going to bother to think for a second that the thing was working like a champ before they pushed the button. They just KNOW that a little man witha brown shoe and a black shoe and green pants and a purple shirt with a funny little hat and a pointy little beard just sneaked up behind the set and rearranged the wires and ran off.

It couldn't POSSIBLY be the results of the button on the remote they just pushed.

Lord help them if they do something intelligent like read the directions when they rehook the set back up. That would be a definite affront to their masculinity and they might have to be forced to wear a dress or something along those lines.

So they reattach the wires and generally do it wrong but it looks pretty good to them so they decide to go with it and leave them hooked up in what looks about right which means that they generally have a wire or six crossed.

Then they generally go to the remote and the keypad and get EVERYTHING all screwed up to a fare-thee-well and give up and leave it for someone else to deal with.

Enter a shipmate that according to some people should be forced to wear a dress and have his pickup painted hot pink. That is because he is an Old School Tough Guy and knows how to get things done. He uses logic, which is an alien concept to many.

The first thing he did when faced with a screwed up TV to deal with is ask who tried to fix it and what they did, which is, of course, a waste of time because he's generally dealing with someone that's going to answer the same thing he did when he was a kid.

"Nothing," is the usual reply, given in the same whiney, nasal tone of voice the culprit has been using since he was six years old.

He, of course, expected that so he does a very feminine thing. He gets out the instruction books that came with the dish box and the TV and sits down and reads a bit and then comes to the diagrams and checks the back of the set to see what is miswired.

It doesn't take him long to find a couple of misplaced cables and he reattaches them according to the directions. WHile there is a marked improvement, it is still unusable so the next thing he does is gets the Dish TV instructions and resets the thing carefully.

The next step is to reset as much on the TV as he can and then tries to set it up according to the instructions. Nine times out of ten this works but not always.

There are always a couple of things that do not reset automatically when you unplug the set so he starts going through the TV and cleans everything out that he can find.

If that doesn't work he picks up the phone and gets on the line with a tech representitive and the rep walks him through it and presto! The unit now works like new.

This process, as sissified as it may sound actually works.

The saying of 'When all else fails, read the directions' is now relagated to history. It is now replaced with 'When something goes wrong, pickup the directions". It will generally save a lot of time and effort.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/