Stuck In An Idiot Loop

This happened in the early 1990s. A customer bought a stereo VCR. He came back a couple of days later with a problem. He’d hooked the audio-out jack of the VCR back into the audio-in jack, and couldn’t understand why the sound wasn’t playing through his stereo.

He was a 30-ish male in a nice suit, basically looked like a stockbroker, and he hooked the VCR into itself — which, surprisingly, did not blow anything up — and wondered why he wasn’t getting sound from a device that was not in any way connected to it.

I explained to him that if he connected the audio-out jack to his stereo — I think I even drew him a diagram — instead of back to the VCR itself, it would work much better. He thanked me and left.