It’s Lunar new years today and while I did have a lot of fun there was this one scenario in the day that got me thinking about spending money based on bad advice from people who simply know more than you do on a topic. There was an elderly lady who was gifted a DVD player but couldn’t get it to work as she had multiple friends try and fix it as well. They determined that her TV was simply not able to use the DVD player or that the one she has is broken.
So she actually did go and buy a new one. However, the same problem occurred. I was then asked to try and help her out and so I went to see what was wrong. It appeared that the DVD player itself didn’t have an HDMI out but rather old RCA cable connections. The old yellow, white, red RCA connections should still work though. That’s where I saw all the errors such as whoever was helping her plugged the video slots into the audio ones. As well, plugging it into the back of the TV it seemed like they plugged the two audio cables into the component video cable section. So I fixed it and sure enough it worked.
Imagine how many times this happens in other areas of our life where we simply ask someone who knows more than we do on a topic to then make say a large purchasing decision on it. Like in this case, the people helping her clearly had no clue and she wasted time and money because of it. I guess at least there was my good deed for the new years day too.