Yesterday I was visiting some relatives, and they complained they couldn't record anything that was on TV. They're completely useless when it comes to anything that has more than one button, so I figured it would be nice and simple.

It turned out not to be, their VCR really wasn't connected to their TV.

They'd bought an entire home cinema system with a nice flatscreen TV, DVD player, speaker system, VCR and digi box, and the guy that had wired them up obviously had no idea what he was doing - he seemed to have taken the cables, and went 'well, thats a scart cable, I'll put it there, and pick a random other scart hole to plug it into' - the DVD player had a scart cable going from the output back into its own input! The coax cable went directly into the back of the TV, and another coax went from the digibox to the VCR, but the VCR wasn't connected to the tv...

The DVD player was connected to the TV via component video cables, so still worked, which is why this took so long to get noticed.

They weren't even watching TV through the digibox, but by the old aerial. They said they 'thought there was supposed to be more channels, but weren't worried about it'.

This was supposed to be a qualified engineer! They paid close to the equivalent of $200 to get this system installed after buying it, and several months later we end up having to rip it all out. I don't even consider myself someone who knows much about this sort of thing, but 5 mins with the manuals and a little common sense and I got it working.

Is this normal? Surely the engineers aren't normally five year olds playing little peg and hole games...