Friends,
I work at a place that serves folks who are down on their luck. In an attempt to get their lives together, they go through various programs that my coworkers provide and hopefully find permanent housing and a job. Self-sufficiency is the model and that’s extra swell.
Swell until an onslaught of folks happened upon the place. Hot meals are just ducky but where to sleep? It’s chilly in the desert right now. Particularly if you’re sleeping on the desert. Wouldn’t shelter for all of those folks be nice too? Sure it would! Mr. and Mrs. Powers That Be decided that a tent would be lovely, so they set to putting one up, full of cots and bunk beds, that would house as many people as possible. As many people as needed a place to stay that was out of the elements.
Everything went as well as could be expected (badly) considering the yokels running the minor town that claims jurisdiction. Handicap ramp is sloped too steeply (1.5 degrees too steep, if you’re keeping score), this dirt isn’t compacted as much as the surrounding dirt, there needs to be a certain number of cots accessible to disabled people (how does that work?), the lighting isn’t bright enough… Blah, blah, functionaries, blah. Once the blather subsided, the disenfranchised lined up for a space in this new soft-sided paradise. But there was something terribly wrong. Oh, horribly wrong! Sweet mother of Walter P. Chrysler, so wrong.
No large screen television!
Our guys had wired these giant sets for cable and I put signal boosters on both ends of the 400 foot run, but no signal. I’d washed my hands of it, but it nagged anyway. I wasn’t interested in the resident’s entertainment, it was a technical challenge—and I had failed. I connected their feed to another line and traipsed out to check the picture. No sooner had I turned on one of the sets and programmed all of the channels (our robot overlords actually take care of that, I just summoned them with a button press) that I realized things were actually working. What’s a non-offensive channel to set them to? Nick Jr. of course. (link warning: super slow Java mess that might crash your browser)
Thirty seconds later, the people who were napping after a no-doubt highly stressful free lunch woke up and were thrilling to the sights and sounds of the Backyardigans. Young and old, 30 pounds or 300, they were glued to the sets.
Um, hooray?
– bob