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Stuck in the Trailer
Baseball tournaments are all a little bit different, but you never know how much different until you're there up close and personal.
The thing is, no matter how much we're scuffling in the office trying to do media releases, the web site and our little tournament newsletter,
we endeavor to never let that interfere in any way with the baseball that's going on. Through the years, we sometimes get to the fifth day, Sunday, so frazzled because of the problems and breakdowns,
that we think the whole thing has been a disaster. But then some parent or coach will come up to you and say, "Nice tournament."
And that puts it all in perspective. We're there so that 300 young men can have a great experience and determine a state champion.
So with that perspective in mind, this was our experience this year in trying to run the office.
We knew that it wasn't going to go 100 percent smoothly when we got to the trailer they had set up in the parking lot and there were no phone
lines and power was only coming out of one receptacle. The trailer was okay. It was dirty and scroungy, but that's what you'd expect from a construction trailer.
I hooked into that one electrical outlet and got a few of our computers going. I ran a long cord from one end of the trailer to the other. I
thought we were in business.
I was soon informed, though, that there was a little problem. Apparently the one power line coming into the trailer only had 20 amps. The expert
informing me about this started naming off the various pieces of equipment: three computers, fax, copier and fan and listing how many amps they would draw. When he was done, it was considerably over 20
amps. For a minute I thought we were on Apollo 13, and we weren't going to have enough amps to get back to earth.
The solution, he said, was to hook up a generator. And soon enough, that piece of equipment was purring away. Well, it wasn't exactly purring,
it was making a sound something like what you might hear at a monster truck rally in the Metrodome. In fact, you almost had to shout in the headquarters office to be heard. I asked him if he could move
the generator down a little bit, and when I came back from an errand, I saw that he had moved it about six feet further away from the trailer. The sound had been reduced from jet engine to World Series
at the Metrodome. You didn't have to shout in the headquarters anymore, only talk loudly and distinctly.
But at least we had power. With some glee we turned on the fax machine and the copier. These are often donations from some local dealer, and we
are grateful for this largesse, but these two pieces of equipment looked like they had been borrowed from the office equipment historical society.
I asked the installer if there was a manual that went with the fax so that I could figure out how to load a bunch of phone numbers into the
machine. "User's manual?" he said, somewhat aghast at this question. Apparently the machine and its manual had been separated at some point around the time of Noah's flood.
He tried to show me how to load those numbers, but the 45-second seminar just wasn't sinking in. But, hey, it would be no big deal to do
those numbers one at a time.
The installers left and assured us they would return if we had any problems. Sometime later, we tried the copier out. No dice. Not a glimmer of
life came from that ancient machine. So we called the office machine company. True to their word, they were back in a flash with a new copier. Well, new is a relative term. If the first copier looked
like it had come from the age of the dinosaurs, this one looked like maybe an ice age model. But it worked, and that's all we cared about.
Now it was time to try out our wireless internet connection. There were four little electrical boxes sitting there looking very important, and
lights were blinking on and off making it look like it might work. It didn't. There was no wireless connection to the internet, although one of our staff was able to hook up a dial-up connection.
Where's our wireless hookup? we asked the hosts. Quick as a flash, the cable guys were out there and made all kinds of adjustments. More light
were blinking, and there was another electronic box. They left and assured us that everything was all right. It wasn't.
We never did get that wireless going that day. The next morning, they brought in another piece of telephone line, and actually got it going.
The generator hummed its pleasant tone all day, but toward evening it must have been getting tired because it started wavering. Loud, quiet,
loud, quiet and so forth. It had been obnoxious all day, but now it getting into mind games.
At midnight, I shouted good night to the crew, knowing that the next day had to be better.
In the morning, I got up my gumption and told the local folks that we really couldn't live with the 100-decible generator anymore. When they
seemed non-plussed by this request, I actually went down the road and got a quote of $140 to rent a quiet Honda generator for the remaining three days of the tournament. But when I got back, the local
folks had replaced the obnoxious generator with a quieter one. It looked like it was going to be a nicer day after all.
In fact, all was wonderful until about half past midnight when I tried to send out my final faxes of the day to the wire services and major
newspapers. Suddenly the fax machine started giving us messages like "H-8" and "H-4." I would have like to know what that meant, but there was that user manual problem.
The next morning, we tried the fax again, and it seemed to be working. But when it came time to send faxes in the middle of the day, it balked
again on sending things out. To this moment, we don't know if the problem was in Methuselah's fax machine or in Laurel and Hardy's phone line hookup. We were able to run a 50-foot phone line to a little
back up fax I had with me, and that seemed to work, half the time anyway.
About 4 in the afternoon, we were happily typing away on our computers in the east end of the trailer when, blam, the power was gone. This was
the power line from a nearby building. Remember the 20 amps? Now there were no amps.
It turns out that despite a big note in the building next door that said "do not turn off" until Monday, the person working there had turned it
off. We managed to get back in business, only losing a few files.
On Sunday morning, we had to do our little newspaper (a couple hundred copies) on the copying machine because there are no copying businesses
open on Sunday in Hibbing. All went good for about the first hundred copies before it conked out. Luckily, we were able to use the fax machine to make copies. You've got to be flexible.
With that done, it was time to turn on the computers, but, no, the power had been turned off again. Apparently that note wasn't large enough.
In the end, we managed to work our way through all these minor aggravations. It hadn't been a pleasant experience, but somehow we had let the
world know about the tournament, done our website and printed our newspaper for four days.
I was in the parking lot ruminating about historic office equipment, off and on power supplies, bad phone lines and loud generator when a parent
from one of the teams saw me and came over.
"Nice tournament," he said, beaming. And then he walked away.
Yeah, it was a nice tournament, wasn't it?
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