For years I’ve been dreaming of a family-home-cinema evening: just the six of us, in our standard five+one formation (five humans + our canis familiaris), squeezing cuddling on our living-room couch and watching a good movie on a big movie screen. Right… now you’re probably asking: oh, yeah, if you’ve been dreaming of this for years, how come you never managed to organize such a simple event so far? Well, the answer is simple: it’s first of all video-projector producer’s fault. Those prices… they’re incredible. Way too high. It’s their fault that so far I could never justify shelling out hundreds of €€€s for a piece of equipment which would be used only occasionally… Oh, wait a sec, my conscience is telling me something: excuses, excuses… Ok, nevermind. In a nutshell: we’ve never had a chance to organize such a family event so far (due to video-projector producer’s pricing policies 🤥).
And then my employer declared bankruptcy, ruining my dream carreer… Ha? Say again? Bankruptcy? What does any company’s bankruptcy have to do with family home-cinema dreams? Well, it has everything to do with it. You see, since the very first moment of the insolvency proceedings, the company (i.e. insolvency trustee) has been trying to get as much cash as possible by selling all possible assets, including all of the remaining marketing collaterals, furniture and IT equipment. For the first time in my life I got the chance to purchase an old but really nice pre-owned Dell DLP office projector at an affordable price. Poor thing has probably been hanging from the ceiling in some meeting room as it was rather dusty, but with only a few scratches and -most importantly- it was in the price range which I could afford (perhaps one could have fished out a similar unit at a comparable price on eBay? We’ll never know…)
[now you get to choose the ending]
Ending nr. 1
And so I brought the projector home, we connected an old laptop via VGA cable (this projector can only do XGA) and streamed “Balto” from Amazon Prime. It all worked out perfectly and we enjoyed our first ever family home-cinema evening and the movie about a brave dog who… ah, you don’t need to know this right now. 🙂
Ending nr. 2
And so I brought the projector home, we connected an old laptop via VGA cable (this projector can only do XGA) and played a DVD movie. Tried to play the movie, that is. Because the darn thing was obviously broken. Aaarrghh! The picture started flickering after only few minutes and projector bulb went off and on again… oh, man. I brought it back the next day, but the IT guys wouldn’t accept any returns. 😥
Ok folks, so what did we learn from this story? Which ending did you like more?
Please leave a comment and like!*
* due to lack of Facebook and Youtube channels, we currently only accept “old-school likes”. Just in case you forgot how this is done: put on your best used car salesman’s smile while looking straight at your device’s display. Now, while smiling and looking straight at the display, make an upwards motion with your hand and do the “thumbs up”. Don’t forget to keep smiling! And if you really like this blog a lot, do the upwards motion & “thumbs up” with both hands at the same time! And now nod with your head. Oh, and make sure you don’t get caught doing this because people *will* be asking questions… 🙂
