Rewiring

Like many of you, over the years we keep adding boxes to our audio/video system. It used to be an antenna to get TV and the sound came out of the speakers. Then came cable. After a while, a video game. A VCR (remember those?). Soon a DVD player. Maybe a separate DVR like TiVO. Maybe a Sling box. Roku? A surround audio system for sure.
In any event, along with the boxes came an awful lot of wiring. Cables of all types – A/V, component video, digital audio., HDMI – we’ve got them all. And frankly, they’re a mess. So this morning, we did something about it and that’s todays thought.

Over time, we just added each item as we bought it.  Everything worked pretty well even if there were too many remotes floating around (the universal remote was anything but).  Until one day, it didn’t.  We’d stopped playing videotapes but suddenly someone wanted to see something that was on one and we couldn’t get the player to display.  Who knew why – maybe we’d borrowed a wire to install something else; maybe we’d forgotten how to hit the right sequence of buttons to bring in the VCR signal.

In any event, we did something that I think business should do as well – we rewired.  We pulled apart all the connections, figured out what each device was and if we needed it, and then reinstalled the wires so that everything worked.  In some cases, it even worked better than when we started (oh THAT’S how you hook up picture in picture!).

In theory, that’s what we all do at budget time but the truth is that we’re usually shopping for our next device without giving much thought as to how we’ll install it or if there’s a shelf to hold it.  Like our living room, we end up with a mass of wires the cabinets can barely contain and hope that we can remember how we hooked everything up.

So today’s thought is to rewire – pull things apart, check the connections, figure out if you really need each piece and ask questions before you put it all back together.  It’s been a beneficial exercise here in the living room and I’m sure it’s even more worthwhile in the office.

Thoughts?