Fix Equipment

Barbri is great. A few thousand dollars gives you the opportunity to watch boring videos in a big room for two straight months. As a bonus, a few of your fellow students act as Barbri Reps. They quiet everyone down, tell you when there are breaks, and run the video. Barbri does not require any specialized, technical knowledge, or really any other skills, of their reps.

As is often the case in universities, our room's technology is less than reliable. This means the video crashes from time to time. It's generally not that big a deal. The Barbri Reps struggle to restart the video while the rest of us continue to not pay attention. Occasionally, one student might say something helpful like: "It's not working". Good times.

Recently, our video started having sound problems. Basically, the sound is fuzzy. Whenever a speaker uses a certain tone, the video suddenly sounds like a World Cup game. I originally thought this fit well with the games I have been streaming, but it really is just annoying. I want to fix it.

I am not particularly tech-savvy. The chances of me, and, probably, my classmates sitting near me, actually fixing the DVD player are really not that good. What I can do, is take things apart. This is a satisfying exercise. There are various ways to take things apart. Hammers and tall buildings can make taking something apart quite quick. But this is the easy way out.

Much better is taking something apart, screw by screw, with the intent of putting it back together. A project like this can take an entire class, and requires some serious attention. In general, this will almost work. You will take the player apart, look for loose wires (always a reason to take something apart), lose a screw, then put it back together, guessing which screws go where (they are different sizes). You will get everything back together, but the player will seem slightly misshapen, and you will have an extra screw. Also, it will not be fixed, and any potential warranty will be void. But this will waste an entire Barbri class, and distract anyone in the area. Success.