A couple of weeks ago, we (the external user provisioning team) needed a projector for our meeting, which we borrowed from PC Service here at work. Along with the projector came three or four different video cables — VGA to VGA, s-video to VGA, and so on.
Later in the day, one of our friends (Paula) came over and said, “what the heck is this cable?” I am usually pretty good at this game. I’ve been around computers for so long that I can usually recognize even the most obscure cable … but this one stumped me. One end of the cable was obviously power, and had both male and female connections for an internal PC power supply. The other end of the cable had an old XT keyboard style adapter (male). The best I could come up with was that it may have been a power cable for an old internal tape backup unit. The cable got passed around a few times and that guess was as good as any. Suffice it to say that, among a room full of computer people who have all been using computers for 20+ years, no one knew for sure what it was for.
At the end of the day, as we were packing up the projector and its myriad of video cables, Johnny came up with the idea of coiling up the mysterious and sticking it in the projector bag along with all the other cables. I don’t know why I found this so funny, but I did. My guess is no one will ever throw that cable out and it will remain in that bag, along with the projector, forever.
Johnny and the Cable.
OK so to make this even funnier…I had a meeting in a conference room with no projector this week, so i had to borrow one from PC services. When we were setting it up everyone was like, “what the hell is this cable. I hope it works without this cable.” Fortunately though, I’ve used that same projector enough to know it would work even without the mystery power cable, but everyone else on the team was skeptical. You know that stupid cable will stay in the projector bag forever because no one will think we have the authority to get rid of it. Thanks Johnny!!! I think I’ll print out this blog and include it in the projector bag.