My version of the story
It was an open evening at my children's infant school a couple of decades ago. I was at the time teaching programming on Prime minicomputers. Didn't have a home computer and hadn't touched any thing of that type.
Teacher sidles up to me and says "you work with computers, don't you? Can you have a look at one of ours?". Much against my better judgement, I did so...
They had two BBC model B computers (I think that's what they were) side-by-side, hooked up to a pair of "portable" TVs (remember the days of cathode ray tubes?). One was working fine. The video on the other was all to pot.
Starting point was to find an expert - so I grabbed a passing child to show me how they would normally start up the systems. Rebooting didn't help :-(
OK - I know nothing, but I can see that one is working and one isn't, so how about connecting each to the other TV? Fortunately I swapped the leads at the computer end and hey-presto the first one now worked fine, the other didn't. Swap the other end of the lead, see that the lead was indeed the culprit and tell the teacher they need to get a new lead.
I think I got a cup of tea and a biscuit, but so did all the other parents.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
