I have no time

The unfortunate pattern I'm beginning to notice is that my social network widens, my academic and work requirements also grow. This semester is already harrowing before Class day #3: I had a book and a half to read over the weekend for two classes, and am coordinating two different jobs.

Whoosh.

In other news:

Today, as we all know, was the Super Bowl (I rooted for the Saints, Brian Williams style,) and Currier neighborhood was showing the game in Goodrich. All sounds well with that plan: Goodrich has cable, the projector is easy to turn on (if not so easy to turn off), and the sound system is nice and loud.

With this in mind, I budgeted 30 minutes to go and get everything set up prior to Feasting for the first time this semester. (I couldn't go earlier for non-blogable reasons) Alas, it was not to be.

The first problem was that the cable device had disappeared. This device and I have a long history, back from the Election 2008 shenanigans that I coordinated in Goodrich, and I wasn't exactly sad to see it gone. However, this was Super Bowl T-Minus 90 minutes, and the situation was not ideal for missing equipment.

I got the hosts at the event to e-mail my boss and the professional tech, and then set about hunting for the thing. It turned out not to have disappeared (which would have been unlikely, given that it's probably not worth its value in parts), but instead was stuck under the Nintendo 64 box that also resides in the closet.

(Yes geeks, we can play Smash 64 on the Goodrich big screen)

Next up was finding the cords for the tuner. They ended up not being in the back of the tech cabinet, where I was fishing with my hand, but instead on the right side. So far, so good: progress.

Having found both tuners, I took the better model and plugged it in, only to get the infamous "this device is not approved for use" message that plagued me last year. We started to explore streaming the game over the Internet to a laptop, but the combined issues of A - no one owning a PC laptop with a VGA hookup; B - no one knowing that the game would be streamed; and C - doubts about the ability of the stream to be a good quality, made us realize that it was cable box or bust. Or so we thought.

People start to arrive, and I get nervous. We set a hard deadline of 6:15, when we would tell them to go home. The Cable Box, after being reset, works! Hallelujah! I turn it on to channel 80, which is.... the CW. Now, don't get me wrong, the CW is perfectly lovely, but it's no CBS, and I went to change the channel....

...and couldn't. The tuner was very happy with the CW, and refused to move, until I hit the "menu" button, which made it remember that it wasn't supposed to work, prompting deactivation.

Having trolled through all of the faulty support numbers on the typo-filled error message, we finally try calling Time Warner. The rep acted as if tuners stuck on America's Next Top Model were completely natural, and advised me to reset the box, wait 5 or 6 minutes until the clock showed up, and then to turn on the box, at which point all should be well.

The problem was that it was 6:06 - and that we were 9 minutes away from deadline. The security guy helping me out (and I'm so thankful for him) suggested using the cable tuner in the VCR, which I hadn't thought of, and we designated this as our backup plan.

4 minutes go by. The clock comes on the cable tuner, and we feel good, but decide to wait until 6 minutes have passed.

1 minute goes by. The clock disappears, along with most of my hopes. We turn it on, and can't get anything to show.

It's 6:13 and we're going to the VCR onside kick.

We get the VCR plugged up, and it shows channel 3, then disappears to a setting called M-1. We can't get it off this - I find the plug and unplug it, we turn it on and off, and press every button we see. Nothing.

Upon the second reset, we turn on the real screen and someone notices a suggestion to hit "menu." I do so, and what follows is a somewhat comic opera of a person outside the closet, telling me how to navigate a 1999 era VCR menu I can't see. We activate the channel search.

There are 125 channels, and it's 6:22. It's a long 3 minutes, but the channel search completes, I press menu buttons a few more times, and channel 3 re-appears, along with additional channels. I head to CBS, just as Carrie Underwood begins the second line of the national anthem.

You can't time it much better than that.