I want to watch the Internet on TV

It can be incredibly difficult trying to help people understand how individual pieces of technology come together to form a system and what role each piece plays in the system.

My presence was requested in a conference room by one of the older folks, who needed my technical wizardry. I walked in to find him sitting at the table, staring at the TV which was turned on, but showing a blank screen. He had a keyboard and mouse (which I later found out were taken from another conference room) on the table in front of him and explained to me that he needed to "get the Internet on this TV, but it wasn't working." I grabbed the remote for the TV, checked the input settings and everything seemed set up properly. Equal parts impressed and surprised that he had gotten this far on his own, I told him it was likely an issue with the computer, but it should be fixable, at which point, he completely blew my mind. He looked at me, and said, in complete seriousness, "what computer?" Unbeknownst to me, they had taken the computer out of this room, and decided to use the TV only for watching videos.

I tried, very hard, to explain that the Internet is data, that you need something to process this data, which is usually a computer, and that it's impossible to "get the Internet" on a TV by itself. I told him that the other 3 conference rooms all had computers with TVs, and that we could very easily set him up in one of those. He looked at me disappointedly and explained that he really wanted to use this particular room. My curiosity now piqued, I asked what was so special about this room, at which point he told me he liked this TV better than the others (I should point out that 2 of the other 3 rooms had TVs that were identical to this one). Rather than risk an aneurysm by trying to have a logical discussion, I gave him 2 options...we could either take the tv and switch it with one of the other (identical) sets and he could use one of the other rooms, or I could get a computer and hook it up to the TV temporarily so he could use "his" TV in this conference room. He sat there contemplating these options for a good minute or 2 before asking me what I thought would be best. My back was a little sore, so I went and got a laptop to hook up to the TV. Figured it would be a lot easier than carrying a 36" set across the office.

In hindsight, I probably should have suggested moving TVs, gotten hurt and gone on disability for a few months...would have been a really nice break.