I went to InfoComm at it got me to thinking about the commercial settings in which CE pros install products. Sometimes it must be pretty surreal.

For instance, apparently prisons are big market for video installations (including teleconferencing) with a high ceiling for growth. But installing products in prisons must be extremely nerve-racking and weird.

What about “adult” clubs? Somebody must be installing the audio/video in those places.

There must be plenty of other strange installation settings. Please share your amusing (or disturbing) stories .... keeping them clean, of course.

Not a personal story but, I have a friend of a friend( I know, sooo clitche)who worked at a “adult” club doing there a/v.

Company A went into a gay club (male on male) and he made smart remarks about the place and the owner of the place heard him. The owner and the employee had words. So without saying, company A was fired from the job.

Along comes the friend of the friend company. They install the a/v to the owners liking without paying mind to the surroundings.

The outcome?? The owner apparently owned multiple “adult” clubs, Company B got the jobs for ALL his spots, PLUS V.I.P passes, to both his gay and STRAIGHT clubs. LESSON TO BE LEARNED THERE!!!

As a direct opposite of the post above, we do quite a bit of House of Worship work.  It still amazes me the amount of electronics, and automation that go into Cathedrals and Churches.  We have seen and installed quite a few extravagant systems.  In a bad economy we have found that people invest in religion and alcohol, so House of Worship and Sports Bars have kept business up.

Here’s a good one for you…

We have a very popular funeral parlor in our town. I call it popular, because the people are very wealthy and have many relatives that live in Florida, (God’s waiting room). In any case, they can’t bury people in Florida because of the water table, so the bodies are shipped up here to NJ.

In this funeral parlor, we installed a beautiful 8 zone central music system into one of the caskets they have in their casket & urn display room. To access the CD player, just open the head piece of the casket. The amps and distribution system is all located in the bottom half. We drilled holes into the back of the casket for ventilation and it works perfectly. There’s also plenty of room for wires and interconnects because most caskets have an internal crank lift within them to raise the body for open casket ceremonies. We also used the rails/polls on the sides of it for incredible FM reception.

The owner at first thought it was a morbid idea, but he had no place else to locate the equipment. Now he loves it and shows it off to many people to “break the ice,” so to speak. I’d get one for my own home, but a fully loaded Mid Atlantic rack is still less expensive than a coffin. Hopefully, it will never require service… but when it does at least we have the best box and packaging to ship it out money can buy.

In 2008, I installed 94 32” LCD TV with built in DVD players at the WTU (Warrior Transition Unit) barracks at a major Army Base in Louisiana.  The WTU was created by the Army after the “Walter Reed” hospital scandal for Gulf War Veterans who were recovering from physical and mental trauma caused by their service to our country.  Each two-person room had two 32” Westinghouses wall-mounted on a very nice Peerless pivoting bracket and connected to cable supplied by the Army.  The troops could watch two screens simultaneously. 

It was funny that some soldiers didn’t want the TVs because their personal TV’s, 42’s and 50’s, were bigger and better, but, as we explained “orders is orders” and, besides, you can never have too many TVs!

My website, http://www.demsystems.com has a slide show with the installs complete with wire concealment.  At our peak, a three man crew from opening the box to handing over the remote with a demo and programmed cable channels could do a two-TV room in 40 minutes!

It felt good to help those who gave much for our country. Semper Fi.

Des

I have actually installed a 32 inch Samsung LCD monitor in a Range Rover with ceiling mount that was welded to the metal headliner sub frame. The LCD could be raised up to be out of the way.

I actually do a lot of installations in Strip Clubs, and gay bars,  its probably one of my better customers in this down economy.  The Jobs range from retuning the sound systems in strip clubs after they have been installed by the bouncer’s “buddy”, to full blown AV retrofits in older clubs bought out by new owners.

One job in particular, I was called in to fix the sound in a club just recently taken over by one of our clients.  When I get there,  its your typical strip club with 3 stages, a bunch of intelligent light, and a horrible sounding Sounding sound system,  half the speakers were louder than the rest of them.  The club is in full swing for a friday night and I ask if there is a better time I can come and adjust the sound, preferably when they are not open.  He insists that its OK if I just do it now as most of the customers wont care anyways.  He leads me to the amp rack, which just so happens is in the DJ booth.  Much to my surprise, the only way to the DJ booth is through the Strippers Dressing room area.

Needless to say, to check what I had done on the signal processors each time, I had to constantly walk through the changing area to and from the main floor and the DJ booth.  There are images stuck in my mind from that day that are not easily forgotten,  and not the good kind either, lol.