Stay Connected

My new laptop showed up this week, so now I'm switching from the so-old-IT-won't-even-support-it HP Windows (ptui!) laptop to a brand new MacBook Pro. Aside from the crapware that the company loaded on the new laptop, it works great.

But.

I work in three locations. With the ancient HP, I had three identical docking stations. In fact, I had three docking stations and a file cabinet full of backups in case one broke because I'm one of the last people who is still using that laptop. I have seven monitors spread out among those three locations, but all I have to do is dock the old laptop and everything magically works.

I have one docking station for the MacBook. So... right there you can see there might be a bit of a problem. Still, I was in the main office on Monday and I had the docking station and I had a drawer full of monitor cables and I thought for sure I'd be able to hook everything together without too much trouble.

Reader, I was naive.

The laptop connections:

• USB C
• HDMI

The monitors:

• VGA
• DisplayPort
• DVI

Cables I had:

• DVI - DVI
• VGA - VGA
• DisplayPort - DisplayPort

So then we opened the other big box 'o cables under my boss' desk and dragged out a few more. We eventually found a DisplayPort-HDMI cable that they used back when the Super Bowl was in town. Granted it was twelve feet long and I could have hooked it up to any of six computers in the area, but at that point I didn't really care. I'd at least be able to get one of the monitors connected.

It didn't work. I have since googled and it turns out it is a unidirectional DisplayPort to HDMI adapter which was exactly the opposite direction of what I needed. There's apparently some technical reason that those adapters are unidirectional and can't be made in the other direction and I'd probably understand it if I hadn't slept through my original degree, but I have accepted the bottom line which is that it doesn't work because *reasons*.

And people wonder why I start laughing when movies show hackers breaking into alien computers in fifteen minutes...