Its almost a cliché in the AV trade media that if you need a topic for your blog, post a picture of a dreadful installation and write a post that both mocks it and moralizes to the AV Pro readers about the importance of doing a better job than the one you’re writing about.

Well, that’s one cliché. The other cliché is writing a blog post about how terribly awesome (or awesomely terrible) you think Apple is.

For todays blog post I’m going to go with Option A.

When I’m in Calgary for business I usually stay at the same hotel. I was there on a prior visit when the hotel was upgrading to HD set top boxes in every room, and I saw the techs from the cable company scurrying around the hotel with spools of RG-6 and armfuls of new HD boxes to outfit the TVs in the 200-odd rooms in the hotel.

Pictured here are the fruits of the cable guys labor in the hotels exercise room. I especially like the way the power cords and RG-6 are casually intertwined, with a single IR plug dangling despondently into space from the whole mess, as if contemplating ending it all out of shame.

Needless to say, when I entered the room, the installation wasn’t working.

However, as the saying goes, once an AV Nerd always an AV Nerd. I troubleshot the connections and the settings on the remote control and got the TV working again (And yes, I watch cartoons while doing cardio. Don’t judge me).

I did however draw the line at cleaning up the cabling; theres a fine line between passion and working for free. I try to avoid the latter.

I know that this was the result of installation done by cable techs, whose daily responsibility is generally limited to running and validating lines, and doesn’t include trimming out well-managed installations.

So lets forego the moralizing this time, as I know that no regular rAVe readers would dream of leaving an installation looking like this, right? Right!?