You may have noticed the end of my last post referring to Sunday going off "without a hitch".
HA!!! There were hitches, my friends, hitches hitching wildly and randomly all over the place.
Which brings to mind - in the phrase, "without a hitch" - what IS a "hitch"????
Sunday morning, I turned on the new laptop which I had spent a good part of my Friday night and Saturday loading up for Sunday morning.
Hitch #1 - Spike briefly mused that he might change one of the songs. I very kindly suggested that he reconsider that thought, since I had only had time to load what was absolutely necessary for Sunday morning. He responded to my calm demeanour, recognized the panic underneath, and agreed. So that wasn't really a hitch. He's a good guy, Spike is.
Hitch #2 - Bass player is sick.
Hitch #3 - Laptop has a 6-second delay from the time you tell it to change the screen, until the screen actually changes. Doesn't sound like much, you say? Count it out, imagining yourself trying to follow the words on a song as it's being sung. one-mississippi ... two-mississippi ... three-mississippi ... four-mississippi ... five-mississippi ... six-mississippi It's long, isn't it? In your imagination, you got irritated with the operator of the laptop, didn't you? Yup.
Hitch #4 - Laptop is also not translating properly to the screen, in that the bottom line is being chopped off. "Change the margins," you say. "It seems like a very simple solution," you say. "Yes," I say, "but what is on the screen, is not what is on the laptop, and it certainly doesn't reflect the margin settings that are there, so I don't think that's really the issue. But if I need to go through every single screen and set the margins in some ridiculous way to solve a problem that is not about margins, I can do that, as long as we start the service 15 minutes late."
Hitch #5 - The person who handles my tech panics on a regular basis arrives. He is also a bass player at times. Poor guy walks in the door, and gets hit with - "The computer isn't working! The bass player is sick!" He listens calmly to the whole thing, then holds up the paper towels in his hand. "That's fine," he says, "but my daughter just threw up in the car on the way here, so I have to deal with that first." Throwing up in the car always wins. I respect that.
Hitch #6 - Halfway through practice the keyboard drops out. Not the player - the actual instrument. Cue the applause, please, for the wonderful people that labelled all the cables and cleaned out the closet, so that there is a working, labelled, easy-to-find patch cord just waiting to be used, for such a time as this.
There were other hitches too, but as I jogged throughout the building, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the offices, across the platform, up to the balcony, down to the basement, over and over again, two things occurred to me:
1. I really AM a running pastor! :)
2. All these hitches were going to lead to an interesting post, right here, on Monday morning.
My tech-friend finished cleaning up his car, went home to get new clothes for his daughter, and returned, having figured out the solution to my computer woes in his head. Click here, click there, change this, maybe it's the resolution - presto! Delay is gone, screen is not cutting off words anymore. I hugged him.
Spike did just great without a bass player, of course. He's a very talented guy, Spike is.
The laptop operator happily danced to the music while she transitioned the screens perfectly.
The first-time teenage camera operator folded his long legs under his seat, and maneuvered the camera with ease. (The 8-year-old that had trained him told me later, "He did a good job.")
And as I leaned back in my seat, hysterical giggles threatening to bubble to the surface, the service came to a successful conclusion, "without a hitch".
