Funny thing happened on the way to church ... well, actually it happened at church. But nobody ever says the line "Funny thing happened after I arrived at _____." Setting up the video on the third floor for a movie night, I notice I've got no audio out of the PC. Not the end of the world for the night, but I decide to see if there's a known cure that might lead to me learning a new trick or two about the massive snake of wires in the AV booth.

Rescue Roger, who's bailed me out of any number of AV setup headaches arrives on his own. I give him the overview and tell him what little I've done to try and repair the status thus far. Upon taking the speaker line out of the PC, we note that there's no audio coming from the PC. That's a bad thing if you want audio at all. Rescue Roger tries a few things. I let him off the hook since we don't necessarily need PC audio for our room this night all that much. We're both about to resign ourselves to defeat on this, then R.R. plugs the speaker back where it was in the first place. Presto. PC Audio.

Lesson for the day: If something is not working as it should on your PC, do the following (in order of preferred action):

a) do nothing, come back in 20 minutes and see if it magically works on its own
b) fiddle with it until it works
c) unplug and then plug back in whatever is pluggable/unpluggable (this is really a variation of b ... just simpler)
d) reboot the computer

I usually go with a) at work - d) when I know my PC has been worked to death and needs a reset. But there tends to be a bit of learning to do at church in the form of a few extra devices to contend with. So I'm not averse to learning a new trick or two. Still, it doesn't take long before the wisdom of a final option makes sense:

e) adapt to the reality that you are limited by what the PC allows you to do.

And if that's just too frustrating to deal with, pick up some reading material and get away from the computer.

Seriously, though, one of these days, I'm going to have to learn the ways of Rescue Roger when it comes to healing audio/video equipment.