The One Where I Fixed Everything… Then Unplugged the USB
Finally, Everything Worked (Or So I Thought)
There’s a special kind of satisfaction that comes from fixing a messy tech setup. You know that moment when you finally get the KVM boxes talking to each other, the displays are behaving, and everyone’s ready to move on with their day? That was me — standing proudly in the church media booth after hours of troubleshooting, cable tracing, and driver reinstalling.
The KVMs had been giving us grief for days. Random disconnects, frozen mouse cursors, ghost inputs — the whole circus. But after swapping cables, updating firmware, and saying a few whispered prayers, everything finally came together. Smooth, stable, perfect.
The USB Incident
Then came the moment.
I leaned in to tidy up a stray cable, trying to make everything look picture-perfect. In my eagerness, I tugged just a bit too hard… and watched as the main USB cable popped clean out of the KVM.
Instant blackout.
All the screens went dark. The mouse stopped moving. The keyboard froze mid-sentence on the streaming computer. I just stood there, staring at the chaos I’d unleashed, wondering how fast I could time-travel back five seconds.
Reboot, Rethink, Repeat
After the initial “no way that just happened” moment, I took a deep breath, plugged it back in, and restarted the KVM chain. Thankfully, everything came back to life — but not before the team in the next room radioed in:
“Hey Derek… did we just lose connection again?”
I may or may not have replied, “Just testing redundancy.”
Lessons Learned (and a Little Laughter)
That day was a perfect reminder that sometimes the hardest part of fixing things isn’t the complex problem — it’s avoiding the simple mistake afterward. Tech ministry keeps you humble. You can configure VLANs and set up RTMP servers all day, but one misplaced USB yank will bring you right back down to earth.
Post-Crisis Recovery Plan
As with most of my stories, this one ends the same way: a trip to Wendy’s. Because after a long day of fixing (and un-fixing) KVM boxes, a Frosty and fries are the only logical next steps.
So here’s to all the tech folks out there who’ve solved the impossible — only to trip over their own cables five minutes later. You’re in good company.
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ October 16, 2025 4:29 pm