Johnny and the Cable

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Entry posted by Flack · April 18, 2008

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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.