10 years ago, my father and I did the tech stuff together at church. Projector, TV display, music, lights, you name it. Whatever the minister and congregation needed, we cobbled it together out of whatever donated stuff we had on hand usually at the last minute.
My father was always the quiet genius, never complained about time crunches or last minute requests, he just did what was needed as best he could. I was more like mom, especially coming into high school, hot about everything, never satisfied with anything. Looking back, I'm sure I asked for a ton of patience. But that's what my dad was teaching me each Sunday, I guess. Together we pulled off some literal miracles of old tech.
So one weekend, after months of talking to my friend about which one to get, I put together all the money I saved over the school year and summer to get a pretty decent gaming laptop. You have to understand that my father is an old school type where wont purchase any new electronics but would rather repurpose old parts. I wasn't having any of that because the computer that I purchased was 10 times faster than the fastest computer that he had at home. And his best computer was 10 times faster than the one that we had at the chapel.
After proving that my new laptop was better than his I began to request that we update all of the older things in the chapel as well. So on Sundays I would request that we would get new lights, new audio equipment, new microphones, new this and new that. He would say it's not necessary but allow me to get what I could anyway.
I spent a lot of money upgrading stuff at church and throwing out older items. In retrospect the equipment that we had been using worked perfectly fine and the newer equipment, while more expensive, was not actually better for our needs.
One day the minister came up to me and said that we had to set up the AV equipment for a brief tutorial on offering collection that was going to be played via video. Simple enough to set up. I went about gathering the TV and then asked the minister for his laptop so I could hook it up to the TV and play the video off of his laptop.
He smiled then from his jacket pocket pulled out a DVD. He told me that his laptop had no CD tray and therefore no way to play DVDs. I said no problem and went to find my personal gaming laptop. With DVD in hand I went and found my dad sitting at a table with our stuff. Upon inspecting my laptop I realized that I too had no way of playing DVDs. I had also recently thrown away the only DVD player that I knew about in the chapel. It had been years since I played a DVD, maybe 5 or more. Nobody uses DVDs nowadays! We had Netflix and the internet to get all that.
I heard familiar laughter then. My father, looking at me clutching this DVD like some alien relic, realized right away what the problem was. He led me to a closet at the back of the chapel where he had stored most of the stuff that I thought I had thrown in the trash. Among them was the DVD player but he still pulled out his ancient desktop tower computer which had an equally ancient DVD player and a new HDMI video card that would allow me to hook it up to the television that we needed to use.
So to this day I have had no heart to tell my father to upgrade or throw away any of his old equipment because the Lord knows I might come asking for it and would have to eat that humble pie all over again.