This is long, I apologize but there's a fair amount of backstory to this that is relevant.

This starts about 2 months ago when out of nowhere a 55 inch display gets delivered. At first I thought it was for the Emergency department as they had a tracker board puke on them. But at this point it's not my circus, not my monkeys so I ignore the TV. Big mistake.

4 weeks ago we were all tasked on the service desk with rounding specific departments which is something we should have been doing all along but with the changes in management, changes in service desk staff and holidays it has slipped by the wayside. No problem with that, it's a good way for department heads to voice concerns about tickets that aren't being worked fast enough, or just to be a sounding board so they can say "I don't know if this is in your wheelhouse, but....". I'm perfectly fine with that.

My department is our MHU, or Mental Health Unit. Pretty decent area where I spent 4 days last year after a couple bad days and a failed attempt. So the department head, Jayme, wanted to replace the TV that's in the day room with another one because it doesn't always power on and sometimes hums. The TV that was ordered was the very same TV that sat in our office propped against our bosses desk for 2 months.

This simply won't do. We've had this TV for 2 months and we haven't gotten it installed? That's priority 1 for me. I will point out that I wasn't part of the original conversation about the TV or I would have made some suggestions that would have fit their needs. But I digress. They also ordered an HP 800 G2 mini pc, little bitty thing that they can stuff behind the TV so they can watch Netflix, some relaxing YouTube videos and play music for relaxation therapy.

The issue is I can't just bust up there and pull the old TV out, toss the new one in and call it a day because the ward isn't just for fat, burnt out IT workers looking for a break from reality...there are actual violent people there as well so the TV is encased in the entertainment center behind half inch thick tempered glass. The glass is held in by 4 1 inch by 1 inch slats of wood that is screwed into the entertainment center. Not a big deal, I have a cordless drill but $Boss wants me to have facilities do it since it's kinda their schtick....fair enough.

So I schedule a time with facilities and we get up there and pull out the old TV and toss it on the cart for decom, but Jayme wants the TV installed via wallmount in the staff break room. So we spend about 15 minutes trying to decide where the best place would be, then drop the old TV off and go back to the new TV. I start with the mini PC and realize there's no network drop, so they are stuck using wireless. Not optimal, but it works. Next thing is the DVD player that's in the entertainment center is broken so they want me to swap it out with the one in the back TV room which is also housed behind tempered glass. So the facilities guy was nice enough to go and grab that while I finish this computer up. I add an auto-login account since boss wants it setup like a tracker board. I drop shortcuts for Hulu, Netflix, Pandora and IE on the desktop and begin setting up the rest of the computer. But since the computer doesn't have HDMI I had to use a 3.5mm to composite adapter to output sound from the computer to the TV. The DVD player also uses composite cables and no HDMI port on it either. Thankfully they have surround sound so I routed the output from the computer onto one channel of the surround sound, and from the DVD player to the other. We get the new TV setup, take the old DVD player and throw it in our decom bin.

During my weekly rounding I mentioned that the TV that she ordered only had 1 set of composite inputs and that the DVD player was using it so they couldn't use the Wii. Jayme didn't like that and I don't blame her. So I recommend that she buy a new DVD player that has HDMI out and plays blue rays as well, she was all for it.

Now if I had been on this project from day one I would have asked her if she really needed a computer or if she just wanted to play Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu which most modern smart players can handle, and I would have had her order a modern DVD player and a TV with at least 2 composite inputs.