Sky Man Will
A year ago, I finally got the dining room sorted.
It had been in my sights for a while, but there were all sorts of other things that needed time and attention first.
Eventually, though, it was the dining room’s turn, and the decorator came over to transform it.
One thing that was definitely on the list was getting rid of as many ugly cables as possible – Sky box, TV, sound system, they all add up.
During the process, a white TV cable with a connector at the end came apart.
Bizarrely, the TV still worked without it – BBC, ITV, and C4 were all there, meaning the white cable was superfluous, a hangover from the original installation.
The decorator asked me whether I was sure it was okay to chop it and sure I was.
Good decision, I thought, until I was channel hopping a few days later and found that Channel 5 didn’t work. Or Dave. And the list doesn’t end there,
I start using the online help, get confused (obviously), get overwhelmed (inevitably) and then just decide to…
…live with it.
Until two weeks ago.
When I decided afresh that enough was enough.
I braved the online help again, got to the third page of instructions, and what did I find on the screen?
A picture of the white cable we’d jettisoned last year.
“Hello, is that Sky? I may need an engineering appointment….”
I was all set to be made to feel a fool for throwing away a critical cable, but the Sky man, Will was lovely and helped me fix it.
More importantly, he came up with a better solution – a cable that runs around the outside of the house and comes into the room right in the corner, and straight into the back of the TV, as opposed to the previous solution of long, messy cables running astride two rooms.
The cherry on the cake – two months’ free Sky Cinema.
It turns out the mistake I made was actually an opportunity to uncover a better solution, and there’s definitely a principle there:
If a process breaks or something goes wrong, think through all the ways there are to fix it – you might uncover a better way to do things.
