Our recent competition to win a Belkin ScreenCast AV4 attracted lots of entries, and saw plenty of readers sharing horror stories of the cabling nightmares in their lounge rooms. It was a difficult task but we’ve picked the winners.
Winner 1
Bryce’s experience highlights the real dangers of bad cabling:
I had been procrastinating for months on the jumbled mess of tangle I had at the back of my AV set-up after constant upgrades and additions. Needless to say after a pretty huge weekend of viewing/listening I had falling asleep only to be rudely awoken by my screaming house-mate and the curtains and ceiling aflame with the jumble of cables spitting green/blue electrical flames and my television now weeping molten plastic onto the wooden floor-boards.
After 30 minutes of frenzied fire-fighting, arguably making every mistake in the book we’d managed to douse the entire fire but were left with half of the room’s floor-boards ruined, the wall and ceiling pitch-black and the entire flat reeking of electrical fumes (not pretty)!
What I’ve omitted so far is that I’d managed to sell my flat only a week before and the new owners were another week away. The gist of it is I took a week off work, spent a small fortune on replacing the floor, sanding and painting the wall and ceiling… and generally trying every trick in the book to get the horrendous odour out. The result? Sale went through however without me making a penny on purchase price thanks to the few thousand dollars spent, not to mention a new found appreciation for keeping my cords neat!
We’re also glad not to have experienced Bryden’s close cabling encounter:
Moved into our new house in Queensland and wired everything up in a mess. When I came back to clean it up, I grabbed this big coil of cable and it promptly wrapped itself round my arm. It was actually a carpet python that had found a nice quiet spot to sleep. Suffice to say I now look closely at rolls of cable before picking them up.
Muz experienced risks of a different kind:
? And as a site that promotes organisation, we decided that Yavuz made a fair point:Whilst dragging my AV cabinet out from the wall to get access to the tangle of cables at the back, an ornament that the wife had put on top of the cabinet fell off, landed on my head, and shattered into pieces. As I struggled to keep my feet, with blood pouring down my face, all my wife could do was abuse me for breaking the wedding present.
I find this competition discriminating against people with good planning and technical skills (like myself). I’ll keep quiet about it in return for one of the units in question.
Thanks everyone who entered — we’ll be in touch with the winners to organise delivery.
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