Cable geniuses at my school

Rhywden

First a representative picture:

This kind of genius continues throughout the school. We have:

automatic controls of blinders and lights. This means that at some point during the lessons the blinders will go down because it's too bright in the room. Then the lights will go on because now it's too dark in the room.
This automatism cannot be cancelled nor be started manually by anything in the room. You need a special remote for that. There's only one(1) of this remote in existance.
If you have actually obtained this remote and decided to darken the room (for a Physics experiment, for example - sometimes you really can't see anything unless the room is absolutely dark), this automatism will sometimes decide at random that the shutters really need to be raised because it's too dark.

But that's harmless compared to the superintelligent beings which were reworking our auditorium (the picture above is from the auditorium's backwall).

Now, sometimes you may want to do a play in a school. Or you have some kind of festivities. Or a speaker giving a speech. For which you need some kind of lighting on the stage.

For which we were given a full-fledged professional solution, the kind you find at rock festivals and concert halls. Well, at least the control desk was professional, fully electronic and programmable up the wazoo. You can guess as to how many of my non-technical colleagues were actually really comprehending how this thing works.

The stage sports 18 RGB-Colour LED lights and 4 moving lights. If everything is switched on and on full brightness, the stage is about half-lit and spotty because all the lights are very tightly focussed. Great!
Those 22 lights need about 160 control channels. One DMX cable supports 256 channels. How many DMX cables were actually installed? Four(4). Why? No one knows. But you need to connect all four to the control desk or it won't work. But it's nice to know that we have plenty of reserves, so if U2 ever needed to stage a concert in our school...

Next up: The moving lights are kind of loud due to their cooling fans. This is a bit of a problem during plays as they're clearly audible during quiet scenes. But there's hope: They also connected two master switches to the control desk so you can power down the connected lights at will!
So, you could power down the moving lights and only use the LED ones. Well... if they had connected all the LEDs to master switch one and all the moving lights to master switch two.
In reality it's: LED 1 through 5, 8, 11 and moving light 1 and 4 are on switch one, the rest's on two. Yeah.

It also took us half a day to find all the motion sensor so we could switch them off. Because as soon as someone moved, those things switched on the big overhead fluorescent lights,

Then there's the beamer. It's a huge, honkin' beamer, daylight capable and even supporting 3D! They even installed a media converter from HDMI to TCP/IP so one could connect a laptop over slightly longer distances (with a second media converter, mind, TCP/IP->HDMI). Only problem: They ran only one network cable. The drop for that network cable is exactly below the beamer.
Now, most speakers don't stand behind the audience but in front of it, on stage. That's usually also where they'd like to have their laptop.
So, in order to have the speaker in front and still Powerpoint (or, indeed any electronic) capability, you either have someone manage the laptop for him from behind or:

You use two laptops, put one on stage and one under the beamer. And use the stage laptop to remote control the beamer laptop through VNC.

Oh, and recently I talked to some people responsible for our renovation about my physics room. I complained that the emergency switch did not, in fact, switch off all electrical outlets in the room, just the overhead ones. "That's not required by law!" Only problem: I cannot use those outlets for my experiments because I usually don't put 5 kV (and above) experiments in the middle of my pupils. After I pointed out that my hypothetical lawyer (if I survived such an event, that is) might disagree with them on that notion, they suddenly discovered that the wiring was not up to spec.