That reminds me of a time in 1992, I was at a car audio shop. A guy comes in with a Pioneer radio he had bought from us (just the Pioneer itself, the harness was still in his car). Demanding we give him a new radio because the one we sold him was defective.
I plugged it in on the test bench (with a spare test harness) and it worked fine - I showed the guy it worked.
He then got mad and said the wiring harness was defective. I go look in his car and he had cut the factory OEM harness out of the car, stripped all the wires back on both the wires in the car and the Pioneer harness, then twisted 'ALL' of the wires together!!!
I said "Your overhead lights, your dash lights, and your cigarette lighter don't work anymore do they". He said yes, how did I know. "Because you are an idiot, find someone that knows what they are doing to help you and don't bring that radio back if you fry it". I refused to touch the car, even if he payed us.

Always an electrician you say!

The work I see from some CI's and untrained low voltage guys looks just like this!

Was this an electrician also?

After all of these years I thought(hoped)that i was the ONLY ONE that had experienced this!

Same time frame,same scenario!

By chance,did he happen to be a college basketball player?

How many times did he need to say "This is unprofessional"?

I did car audio for a long time and saw some amazingly creative work. Several times, Bell wire was used for speakers ("I need four wires. This has four wires."), some horrendous wiring and one time, a 4 ga power cable run along the edge of the hood, through the hood hinge and down the trim for the kick panel and wrapped around the edge of the steel without any protection in an '80s Firebird. I guess it might have been OK, if the power cable had been fused at the battery.

I did some work for a past employer and on one job, he thought he could save some money on cabling by telling us to daisy-chain the Cat5e for the network. Seemed to think it works the same as a simple telephone.

The last place where I did 12V, the sales idjits at our store apparently couldn't bring themselves to sell installation or extended warranties. Say what you want about them, when electronics are in a hostile environment and it covers removal/reinstall for service if we installed it, the extended warranty pays for itself in very many cases. The real reason management wanted install and warranties sold, aside from the fact that it was basically a big slush fund, was due to the huge amount of returned goods. They had determined that if the equipment was installed outside of our shops, 42% was returned as 'defective' and if it was installed by our shops, the return rate was .1%. If it was returned as an initial defect, it was sent to the service department for repair and if no problem was found, service billed that sales department $19/piece for labor and it was put in the display case for opened box items, at a lower price. Sometimes, the customer would just return the item and the sales idjit would lose the sale & commission. Trying to get them to understand why they should sell install and warranties was like talking to a rock.

I think 99% of the power amps and processors came back because the pinhead who tried to install it didn't understand what the 'Remote' terminal was for.

Sad thing is, those taped interconnects are more reliable than HDMI. I know an installer from late 70's and 80's that did this type of work. Even powered subs with zip cord done this way. Kind of funny every time we worked on a house in the 90's when he left town and saw this stuff on rewire/upgrades but it worked. Video too.

One more way in which the designers of HDMI showed their lack of engineering prowess.

Listening to these two while the old guy tries to use a screwdriver is worse than the install.

Here's a question for y'all who has punched down on an 88 block.

One of the items that was complained about in the video was the lack of a standoff. My question is, why is a standoff even an option? Why not just integrate the standoff with the 88 block? Or at least sell both in the same package.

KOT

Well, a 66 block, anyway.

The standoff is used to set up the block with a neat and almost invisible positioning of the wires. Six CAT cables will use up the first 48 positions on the block without any interblock wiring. This just makes it easier to see which wires go where from block to block.

This made massive sense when 25 pair cables were ubiquitous, but it's still a LOT neater than punching down your main wires from the side, then adding interconnects from the sides.

Why aren't they sold in the same package? Sometimes they are.

You meant what I knew.

KOT