Awake

Adventures in Visual Communications

I hate being right sometimes. Especially when things go wrong when I didn't do what I knew to be the right course of action. So I guess what I really mean is: I hate knowing right and doing wrong.

Besides the fun "romantic" tasks of videography, coordinating photography, and blogging the group's stories, I'm also the group's "tech support," one of the most unromantic tasks ever necessitated by plugged-in, dialed-up society and more specifically this plugged-in, dialed-up group of 25. Believe me, every step of the day has literally been an adventure.

First, plugging in. We brought all these laptops for the group to use for preparing talks and using e-mail. But I brought the wrong powerstrips and the wrong plug thingamabob which I took to be a electrical converter (which is now less nobly engaged as a support stand for the (now burned-out) electrical converter, borrowed from the Crawfords (whom I now owe a new one). The powerstrips were all wrong because they only can take 125w. Before reading the back of the strip and discovering this salient fact, I blew the fuse in my hotel room three times. (Yes, I was jetlagged and very very slow in the brain. Plus, I admit, I kinda liked the sound it made when it blew. It was a feeling akin to watching The Village for the first time when the kid in the watchtower opens the hatch and sees a creature suddenly appear below. Jumpy!) So, to remedy the powerstrip problem, John S., Mei Yee and I took an auto-rickshaw (my first!) to an electronics store (think "hole-in-the-wall", not "Best Buy") and got a universal powerstrip, a ginormous electronic converter of sorts (the real name for it escapes me at the moment), and a couple of bitty converters, one of which we needed for the shredder.

But I am weighing you down with tedious details.

The dialed-up related adventure happened on Tuesday. We have a couple of CDMA phones that we are using to connect to the Internet. First problem was that they only work on PCs; second problem was that I had Virtual PC installed but not set up on my Powerbook and due to the fact that I forgot the serial numbers on my living room table (read: disaster fall-out zone); third problem was keeping the phones charged and being able to use them for any length of time.

Luckily, in my family, we love adventure and I sent my mom into my living room to fetch the product keys. She informed me that "yes it was a disaster" (I told her so) but she very bravely and successfully found the numbers and e-mailed them to me. (Note to Microsoft: I hope you're satisfied.)

Problem three was keeping the phones charged. John S. had this nifty setup on his CDMA phone cables (the USB and power) which allowed him to plug the phone into the wall and into his USB port at the same time. "Brilliant!" I thought. "Must have this!" I mused. So on Tuesday, Mei Yee and I dropped off the others from our trip to the fancy-pants bookstore and set off in search of the Reliance "office". ("Office"="Store") For two hours we drove around and finally full-circled back to one of the stores we inquired at in the beginning. Through the wonders of my education in cross-cultural communication (which I am still paying off) I explained (read: "gestured" or "re-enacted") that I needed a data-cable that plugged into the wall and the computer at_the_same_time. I think I actually saw a light bulb click on above her head. She peeled back a tiny rubber covering on the USB data cable she had in her hand to reveal an plug for the power cord to occupy. Shania Twain. I couldn't believe it. I think she saw a 4th of July fireworks display above my head as I bemoaned another needless adventure entirely due to my own poor slow brain.