We had a plumber in the other day, trying to clear a clog in one of the urinals that we couldn't fix on our own. (Yes, a clogged urinal. How? Our customers are fucking savages, that's how.) So the plumber says, "We're going to have to bust into this wall here, they didn't put in a clean-out port for this drain!" I walk by, point, "Is that it?" He says, "Oh. Yeah." 
All plumbers are like that. All of them. Also, they eat their young.
You know those TVs we have? Yeah, you've probably never noticed them. They're turning out to be such a disappointment.
Those of you who have been following along from the beginning may remember that we've got this little private cable-TV network inside the club that distributes the video from the various webcast cameras around to a bunch of televisions around the club, each TV showing a random picture from a different camera. The original plan was to have a whole lot of these TVs all over the place. What we ended up with was four stacks of them: under the main stairs; above the couches in the lounge; in the coat-check counter; and behind the fence in the main entrance.
Except these days, they're mostly dark.
Here's the problem: we thought, "oh, we'll just get a bunch of old TVs, people throw them away all the time." Well, turns out, those old TVs are being thrown away for a reason, which is usually that they no longer display a picture. Not that a noisy picture is a bad thing: some TVs are really cool looking with analog noise, or a missing color channel, or a rolling picture. But most of the TVs we ended up with weren't like that; they were more of the "no picture, just static" variety.
But, we can't even solve this problem by throwing money at it and buying new TVs. Apparently we are suffering under the iron fist of "EnergyStar" legislation: most TVs manufactured within the last decade or so can't be turned on from a power strip! Really old TVs (the kind with knobs for changing the channel) had hard switches and would come back on when you re-applied wall power. But most modern TVs have "soft" power switches, and after you flip on the power strip, you have to also press the button on the front. And even worse, a lot of them re-set to channel 2 when you pull the plug. We have a lot of these new-ish TVs these days, since that's what people are discarding now. The really old ones are all gone already.
So, for a while, the floor staff would go around and poke each TV at the beginning of the night to turn them on, and occasionally tweak the tuners to make the signal come in. But that hasn't been happening on any kind of regular basis for a while now, and almost all of them are just dark and disappointing. (To me. I assume nobody else knows they're there at all.) Bleh.
